Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons)

by Secchia, Marc

  Ignathion arranged his mighty frame gingerly on the tiny stool drawn up to her bedside. He placed a pitcher of water on her bedside shelf. “Physician’s orders,” he said, indicating the water. “You’re to drink it all. That Beri. By the Islands, she has my most seasoned warriors skipping about like lambs to fulfil her every request.”

  “Sounds exactly like Beri,” Aranya mumbled around a mouthful. “Excuse my manners.”

  “I’ll excuse a great deal from the woman who saved my life,” said Ignathion. “For which, despite the embarrassment it will cause me evermore, I most gratefully thank you, Princess of Immadia.”

  Aranya eyed his bandaged head sympathetically. “If I recall rightly, it was you who took the brunt of the windroc’s attack–thank you. You saved me. How fare your wounds? How come I didn’t fall from the Dragonship?”

  He inclined his head graciously. “My wounds? They fare passably. I’ve the thickest skull in the Island-World, I’m told. Go easy with the purple beans. They’re furnace-blast spicy.”

  “I’m glad the bird didn’t peck out your brains. How’s your back?”

  Ignathion was scrutinising her with a quizzical expression that made Aranya wonder if he had ever stopped loving Izariela of Fra’anior. She disguised her discomfort by tucking into the fowl, again a succulent and irresistible dish. Flattering attention, yes–but for her dead mother’s sake? Creepy.

  Ignathion said, “The armour saved my worst blushes. It’s an old soldier’s habit–never taking off one’s armour. Smelly, but it’s saved my life twice from assassins and once from a disgruntled soldier. I lost some skin on top, but I’ll live.” Fresh crimson was seeping through the bandages above his right temple. “The steersman says the windroc saw its own reflection in the cabin crysglass and attacked, thinking it was another bird. Perhaps that dangling soldier–Gurathion, one of my best–was the bait.”

  Aranya asked, “Are windrocs always so aggressive?”

  Ignathion grunted his displeasure. “A concentrated attack this late in the season is unusual.”

  Still puzzling over what she remembered, she asked, “But … why didn’t I fall? I don’t understand.”

  “Your ankle chain snagged on a strut.” Ignathion had the grace to look shamefaced as he said this. “Before the strut bent, I got a paw on the chain, too. My men pulled you up.”

  “So, your two saves beat my one?” chuckled Aranya, punning on the common card game called ‘Staves’.

  “Who’s counting? We’re both alive.” But his grizzled face split into a grin. “What measure of courage makes a Princess of Immadia leap on a windroc like some maddened rajal?”

  “A brand of foolishness I–”

  Ignathion shook his head. “You’ll get the better of the stories. I will earn sniggers. Now, what of Immadia’s wounds?”

  “The crysglass cuts on my back are the deepest,” said Aranya, “but the physician is happy with those. The right calf muscle also heals well. The glass nicked the tendon but apparently did not sever it.”

  “Bravely said, for a woman who has over a hundred stitches in her body.”

  “I’ll live.”

  She would, but she hurt all over despite her brave words and a bellyful of pain-killing herbs or serum, whatever the physician had prescribed her. Ignathion’s eyes told her that he did not buy her show of bravado. He said, “Aye, we both cheated the Cloudlands that day.”

  “A pox upon the Cloudlands,” she echoed, responding appropriately to his use of the old saying.

  The First War-Hammer leaned forward on the stool, his gaze suddenly so intense that Aranya found herself unable to look away. He whispered, “Aranya, I knew from the moment our paths crossed, that our fates were twisted together. That incident, now three days past, only proves that presentiment. I cannot pretend to understand the future. But I will say this: I have a trusted man at the Tower of Sylakia–Nelthion by name. If you ever need to get me a message, he will aid you. A First War-Hammer has little influence in the Tower of Sylakia, but I promise to help as I can.”

  He raised his right hand, palm held toward her. Aranya matched her slender fingers to his calloused, blunt-fingered paw, sealing an accord between them.

  He said, “Tomorrow afternoon, we arrive in Sylakia.”

  She trembled.

  * * * *

  The Dragonships climbed to surmount the looming massif of northern Sylakia Island, a league or more of bare, vertical granite cliffs rising sheer from the rust-tinged Cloudlands that lapped at their base. From there they cut for hours across a land of jumbled hills and tangled wilderness. There was not a single sign of Human habitation.

  “Rajal country,” said Ignathion, without looking up from his scroll.

  Aranya declined to display her ignorance by asking how large or what colour rajals were.

  By late morning they had traversed many leagues southward. On the map Sylakia measured forty-one leagues north to south, and twenty-eight across its midsection. Aranya had not realised how much was uninhabitable. But after they crested the latest line of low hills, the land smoothed out. Farmlands appeared, dotted amongst thick bands of forest, a rash of small villages, even a sizeable town. The engines thrust them now to the southwest, until a great cleft appeared in the land; a place that split the Island apart like the deep cut of a dagger into a fruit. On the lip of this extraordinary canyon, Aranya saw crimson flags waving over Sylakia Town, the capital city of the Island-World north of the Rift.

  Ignathion’s Dragonship angled for the western tip of this town.

  A sense of dread and doom enveloped her. Aranya fought it, forcing herself to stand still and show no sign of the war within her.

  Viewed from above as the Dragonship descended, the Tower of Sylakia was a wide, round building set squarely atop a forbidding spit of rock separated from the main city of Sylakia–ten times larger than Immadia’s city and considerably uglier, in her admittedly biased opinion–by two hundred horizontal feet and a vertical league of sheer cliffs. As they approached, Aranya’s keen eye made out a kind of moat around the building, right on the edge of the cliff. There were animals in that dry moat, she realised. Prowling felines, the largest cats she had ever seen, so dark they resembled lumps of coal scattered around the palace’s edge.

  Rajals? She imagined they might reduce anyone’s desire to go exploring.

  A truculent breeze buffeted the Dragonship as men on the ground below secured the moorings. She noticed a group of well-dressed people watching from beside the small landing-field. Her fellow exiles? She hoped to find friends among them.

  But first, she had to suffer the indignity of being lowered to the ground in a basket. A Sylakian warrior helped her alight.

  Aranya, cane in hand, hobbled toward the Tower of Sylakia, the palace of exiles.

  The Tower was austere and heavily built, quite the opposite of the airy, open colonnades of Immadia’s castle. She disliked the low ceilings and dull interior décor at once. There was scant welcome for a Princess of Immadia, which irked her–not that she expected trumpets and flag-waving multitudes. A couple of half-hearted hands raised by the group alongside the field was the best part. A pinch of recognition would have served, she fumed, not some tongue-tied dunce of a junior servant who managed to lose his way twice on the way to her new quarters. By the time they entered the assigned rooms, poor Beri was puffed out and Aranya in such pain that she sank into the nearest chair with a deep groan.

  The servant dumped her belongings on the bed and bolted as though he had spied a windroc in the room. That was wise.

  “Miserable hovel!” Aranya exploded. “Beri–sit down. Catch your breath.”

  “Princess–”

  “Not a shred of common decency. Unbelievable. Are there even windows in this room? Islands’ sakes Who chooses drab khaki drapes? Sit down, I said. You don’t look well.”

  Beri perched on the bed. “Maybe just a few breaths.”

  But they both looked up in surprise as a girl of about her own
age appeared from an as-yet unseen alcove behind the hangings. She was small, almost elfin, with dainty features and vivid blue eyes, but there was a quickness and sureness in her movements, and what Aranya took for a swagger in her walk.

  “Welcome to paradise,” she said, drolly. “You must be the new girl.”

  “Aranya, Princess of Immadia.”

  “Airs and graces don’t serve us well here, Princess.” Aranya was so taken aback at her tone that she simply stared. “Now, do you like your chambers? I prepared them myself.”

  “You … prepared them?”

  “Fluffed up the pillows fit for a Princess who can afford her own maid, turned down the bed, even opened a window or two. Unbearably dusty in here. And stinky.”

  The wretched girl was so direct–did she have any manners at all? She had not even bothered to introduce herself. Dragging a civil reply out of her storehouse of those very airs and graces, Aranya began, “I’d thank you to–”

  “You really brought your own maid?” interrupted the girl. “Don’t they teach you to dress yourself in Immadia? I mean, it’s hardly the hub of the Islands, but honestly, can anyone be more spoiled?” Riding right over Aranya’s splutters of outrage, she added, “So I’ll be looking after you, Princess of the northern end of beyond–showing you around this little hovel, as you put it. When would you like to start?”

  Aranya never found out what she might have said, because at that moment, Beri screamed. “Snake!”

  She flicked her right hand. A small, thin reptile smacked the wall. Leaping to her feet, Aranya stamped instinctively on its head.

  “Beri?”

  “Oh–I think I’ve been bitten.”

  “Where? On your hand?” Aranya’s gaze leaped to the girl. “You! You prepared the room? You prepared it?”

  “I-I–” stammered the girl, shrinking back as the much taller Princess of Immadia advanced upon her, eyes blazing. “B-But I didn’t–”

  “Oh, I feel queer,” said Beri, putting her hand to her heart. “Was that … a copperhead?”

  Aranya drew breath and screamed, “You prepared the room? Get out. You lying piece of slug vomit–out!”

  She swung the wooden cane, striking the girl a glancing blow on her shoulder as she dodged. Feeling the fire, the terrible fire, rising up into her throat along with her gorge, Aranya could only spit, “Out! Out!” and as the terrified girl bolted, she flung the cane so that it thwacked the back of her head.

  Panting, she turned to Beri.

  She saw blue lips in a pale, straining face. The elderly maidservant struggled for breath. She tore off her headscarf and wrapped it around Beri’s upper arm, yanked it tight … but she knew. A copperhead was one of the deadlier vipers of the Islands. She held Beri to her bosom, stroking her cheek.

  “Oh … Aranyi … darling,” whispered Beri, changing her name to the diminutive, most cherished form. “I’m so cold.”

  “Don’t … Beri, please. I’ll hold you. It’ll be alright, you’ll see.”

  But the blue of her lips shocked Aranya. She had never seen a person deteriorate so fast. Two thin trails of blood marked the back of her right hand, rising from the base of her little finger. Beri had sat near the pillow. Exactly where that girl must have hidden the viper. The sheer audacity of that little wretch, to lie in wait to see the Princess of Immadia perish. She shook her head.

  Beri vomited weakly.

  Abruptly, she remembered what she had tried to do for her mother.

  She whispered, “Yes.”

  As carefully as though she were dream-walking, she laid Beri back on the bed. She placed her hands on Beri’s chest. Aranya closed her eyes, clearing her mind, seeking to summon up that feeling, so long denied and buried, the way it had been … and suddenly, there it was, a mysterious potential blooming within her mind, drawn from an unfamiliar place that she knew was other and yet part of her, a sense of welling power contained behind the terrace lake barriers of her mind. Deliberately, she gave herself over to it. She poured herself out for Beri’s sake. She gave her all, expecting nothing in return.

  Aranya collapsed beside Beri on the bed. The coverings felt unbelievably soft, as though she had pillowed her head on the cotton-puff billows of the Cloudlands.

  Her eyes, lacking the strength even to shutter themselves, watched her maidservant sit up, patting first her chest and then her hand in apparent disbelief. She must be dreaming. Beri was dead. She was dead, looking back from the next life at the activities of the living. The bed moved. Shortly, a hand appeared beneath her nose. Aranya tried to squint, but her muscles were so enervated that they refused to focus.

  A scent of jasmine and reloidik oil wafted by her nostrils.

  Strange–a glowing person stood in the corner of the room? She saw her mother, garbed in one of those flowing Fra’aniorian lace-gowns with their extravagant ten-foot trains. She was smiling.

  Aranya drew breath. Oily scents exploded as colours in her brain.

  She gasped.

  “Come back, Aranyi. Come back,” Beri muttered. She slapped Aranya’s cheek gently. “You’ve living yet to do, Princess.”

  “I … see my mother. Izariela.”

  Startled, Beri glanced over her shoulder. “There’s no-one there, petal.”

  Aranya could not understand. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She perceived the world at a level of detail she had never appreciated before. Dust motes, highlighted in a sunbeam creeping through a tiny tear in the drapes, individually impressed their presence on her senses. Beri’s wrinkled cheek became a fantastical landscape. She saw life wriggling and pulsing and struggling within the teardrop that sparkled in the corner of Beri’s eye.

  “Princess? Why’re you looking at me like that?”

  “Because I see love written in every crease of your face–didn’t you know?”

  The old woman’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly. The teardrop filled, expanded, spilled over the corner of her eye and tracked down her cheek.

  “You’ve gone soft in the head, Princess,” she said, gruffly. “Your mother used to say things like that. I’m going to find us some food in this mausoleum. You need to eat. Then I’ll find out how we get a few nice things in here.”

  “And a bed for you.”

  Beri nodded. “Rest. If you move so much as one inch from this bed I’ll whack you harder than you did that fool girl, Princess or none.”

  “Will you check the bed first, Beri?”

  As the servant carefully turned over the pillow-rolls and bedding, Aranya silently thanked her father for sending Beri, and Beri for being willing to accompany her, and traced the warmth of gratitude within her soul for the life that still flowed through her old friend’s veins.

  “All’s clear.”

  Aranya lay on the bed and watched the motes dancing, infinitesimal golden Dragons frolicking in the golden suns-light, whirling and swooping in glorious flight.

  * * * *

  Aranya and Beri hibernated for five days after the snakebite incident. By day three, Aranya had tossed her cane into a corner and was feeling fit enough to start climbing the walls. Beri turned her own mysterious magic on the Tower staff. There was a moderately successful shopping trip to Sylakia Town–for Beri, because she apparently could wangle privileges her captive Princess would never gain–and then a day where a bevy of workmen appeared a dozen an hour to replace the drapes, carry in a bed and various dressers, deposit mounds of mysterious boxes and packages around the room, setup a changing screen, fill in the ‘extra aeration features’ around the ancient crysglass windows, replace the door locks, and fix the minor flood her first attempt to bathe had occasioned in the bathroom.

  By the ninth and last day of the week, they had a bedroom that looked like a bedroom–nothing fancy, but it was serviceable. Aranya had commandeered a corner for her painting and spent all her hours churning out canvases. She knew she was being a hermit, but found herself unable to contemplate taking on life in the Tower of Sylakia in all its dubious
glory.

  “Ha!” Beri congratulated herself for at least the fifteenth time, eying up the new drapes she had ordered. “Brightens the whole room, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Aranya set down her paintbrush. “Beri, you’re a marvel. I don’t say it often enough.”

  “Oh, you’re just humouring me.”

  “I am. But you are a marvel. How did you find canvas? And paper–isn’t that ridiculously expensive? Just look at the quality of these paints …”

  “Girl, what’re you painting that’s got your head floating in an Island suns-set?”

  Aranya beckoned her around the easel. “Come on, Beri. You’ve been itching to take a look.”

  “I’m itchier than a bowl full of prek-brush fluff. Which, may I remind you, you stuffed inside my mattress not too long ago.”

  Aranya groaned. “These things seem funny when you’re eleven summers old, Beri.”

  Beri tilted her head critically as she studied the painting. “It’s all wrong. No, don’t hiss between your teeth at me. That’s not how it happened–not according to the man in your painting, anyhow. This outline will be you, here? I love the windroc–so fierce. The expression on Ignathion’s face is stunning, riveting … but he’s protecting you?”

  “It’s more dramatic this way,” she hedged. “His face took me two days to paint.”

  “I hope this doesn’t signify your pangs of romantic love for the First War-Hammer, Aranya.”

  “Beri! Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Girls your age tend to get funny notions into their heads,” Beri returned, with a testy snort better suited to a grumpy mountain goat, in Aranya’s opinion. “Funnier ones, even. Believe me, I was your age once.” She soothed, “Well, I did swaddle your grandfather when he was an infant, but still. This work will be one of your finest. The War-Hammer and the Windroc. I love it. And this one?”

  “Life inside a teardrop,” said Aranya.

  “Why don’t you paint a few canvases to go up on these horrible, bare walls?”

  Aranya smiled. “At once, o great commander. I’ll need more easels, however.”