The Fire Dragon

by Katharine Kerr

“I don't know why that was so hard to hear,” she said at last. “That's exactly what I expected you'd say.”

  “It's not just a question of seeing my father. It's this— this—madness of mine. Out in the Westlands, there's someone who can help me, Meranaldar tells me.”

  “Can you trust him? You've never seen him before this day.”

  “He comes from Evandar.”

  “So? I don't understand why that should be—”

  All at once she realized that tears were running down his face in two silent trails.

  “You don't love me anymore,” he said.

  “What? Why? Just because I don't want to get on a ship and lose everything?”

  “We'll take our children.”

  “Kwinto doesn't want to go, and neither does Tillya. I've already asked them. We should be thinking of getting them married, not running all over the ocean.”

  “You're the one who doesn't want to.” He spoke very softly. “You don't want to come with me.”

  “I love you. But to leave my children—” Marka paused, gulping for breath. “Why can't the healer come here, and your father too?”

  For a long moment Ebañy stared at her. He had stopped crying, and he turned away to wipe his face on his sleeve, leaving dust smeared across his cheeks.

  “You don't understand what you're asking,” he said at last. “It's bad enough that the good folk of Luvilae have seen this ship and its crew. But if we leave quickly enough, they'll turn the entire thing into a storyteller's fancy, and no one else will ever believe it. But to come back and forth—” All at once his voice dropped, as sonorous as a priest's. “No. It's too dangerous, to let the people here learn of the rich islands in the far south. The omens are all wrong. I see burning and spilled blood.”

  Marka felt fear clot in her mouth like sheep's wool.

  “Besides,” Ebañy went on in his normal voice, “it's time for the exiles to meet again. The Lords of Fire told me that. Or maybe it was the voice in the dream. It's so hard, sometimes, to sort it all out.”

  A night wind swept through the camp, rustling the tents and the trees. The flaming wick dipped dangerously, then died. Ebañy snapped his fingers over the lamp. The flame burst into life.

  “Ah ye gods,” Marka whispered. “It's true! You do have real magic.”

  “The dweomer, yes.” Ebañy looked up, puzzled. “I told you that, didn't I? I'm sure I did.”

  She could only nod for an answer. Behind her she heard someone yawn and turned to see Zandro, standing naked at the tent door and rubbing his eyes. When Ebañy held out his arms, Zandro ambled over and flopped into his lap.

  “You'll come with Papa, won't you?” Ebañy said.

  Zandro nodded and began to suck his thumb. It was at that moment that Marka realized she wouldn't be sailing with the ship.

  And yet she argued with herself. It was her duty to go. She was Ebañy's wife, and she should follow where he led, unthinkingly, lovingly, blindly. She was being selfish, wrongheaded, untrue to her womanly nature, to say nothing of depriving her children of their father. And yet like a drumbeat her heart pounded out no no no every time she thought of sailing off north to some unknown country and leaving Kwinto and Tillya behind. Ebañy said nothing more, merely watched her with Zandro sleeping in his arms.

  It seemed to her that they must have sat that way for half a night, watching each other in silence, yet it was still long before dawn when she saw lanterns bobbing through the dark camp. They turned out to belong to Meranaldar and two sailors, hurrying through the tents. Ebañy handed Zandro over to Marka and stood to speak with them. She could see them looking at her with puzzled glances. Finally Ebañy turned back to her.

  “If you and the children are coming,” he started, then let his voice trail away.

  “We'd best get ready?” Marka laid Zandro down on the ground cloth. “When are we leaving? On the next tide out?”

  “Just that.”

  In the flickering light she could see his eyes, begging her. She rose, dusting off the back of her tunic.

  “I can't.” The words seemed to burst out of their own accord. “I can't do it, I just can't. The children—it's too dangerous. What if there was a shipwreck? What if they all drowned?”

  “I'd not thought of that.”

  “No, I don't suppose you did.” The venom in her voice surprised her.

  “My love, forgive me! I'll come back. I promise you that. No matter how far I go or how long I spend there, I will come back for you.”

  For a long moment Marka merely looked at him.

  “I'll go get Zandro's clothes and his little horses,” she said at last. “He'll want them.”

  As she ducked into the tent she could hear the Long Ears, murmuring in their soft language. She found Zandro's tunics and the wooden horses his father had carved him, then stuffed them all into a tent bag with his blanket on top. For a moment she stood in the darkness listening to her other children's slow breathing. Could she really let Zandro go? They all need me, she thought. He'll drain me dry, and then there'll be nothing left for the others. She took a hard deep breath and strode back outside.

  Ebañy had picked Zandro up, and he was half-asleep, snuggling into his father's shoulder. When Marka held out the tent bag, Meranaldar took it from her. He pushed out a watery smile and murmured a few words that she recognized, eventually, as “please forgive me” in bad Bardekian.

  “It's all right,” she said, even though she knew he'd not understand her. “You're only doing what you must.”

  Yet still he hovered, bowing a little, saying a few words that would then miserably trail away. He cares more than Ebañy does, Marka thought. She turned to her husband and found his face wiped clean of all feeling.

  “Just go,” she snapped. “Please. Just go and get it over with!”

  Ebañy nodded. He settled Zandro more securely, turned, and walked off fast, with the sailors trailing behind. Meranaldar hesitated, then grabbed her hand and kissed it, bowed once more, and ran after the others. Marka waited until they were out of sight, then dropped her face to her hands and wept.

  “Mama?” It was Kwinto's voice.

  She turned around fast and tried to wipe her eyes.

  “You don't have to hide it,” he said, his voice shaking.

  “I just—well, I just wanted to thank you. I mean, for all of us.”

  “It's going to be hard at first, without your papa.”

  “I know. We'll manage. The show's strong enough to hold an audience even without him.”

  Oh by the Star Goddesses, Marka thought. He really is almost a man, isn't he? Somehow I hadn't noticed.

  “You know something,” Kwinto went on. “He didn't even come into the tent to say farewell to us. He didn't even kiss the little girls good-bye.”

  “Ah!” She heard her own voice turn heavy with grief. “No, he didn't, did he? I don't know what to say—”

  “Don't even try, Mama. You need to get some sleep.”

  Marka went to bed then, for a few hours, and cried herself to sleep, but when she woke in the morning, she felt only an emotion so strange that at first she couldn't identify it. She got up and dressed, then slipped out of the tent without waking the children. The dawn had just broken, and the eastern sky spread out in pale pinks and blues, touched here and there by an ivory wisp of cloud. In a cool wind, she walked through the drowsy camp to the edge of the caravanserai, where far below her she could see the ocean and the wooden pier. The only ship in sight was a fisherman's boat, bobbing on the small waves in the harbor.

  Standing in sunlight, watching the blue-green waves run up onto the shore, it came to her. She felt free. She would miss Ebañy, but not as much as she was relieved to be free of his madness. She would have a peaceful middle age now, surrounded by her children and her children's children, the undoubted matriarch of the troupe, safe in the travelling life she had always known. With a long sigh, she stretched her arms out to the sunlight. When she walked back to camp, she was smiling.<
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  In his dreams Salamander had sailed on so many wondrous voyages that for most of the journey he had no idea if he were awake or asleep. As the elven longship rode the summer trade winds north for Deverry, he would crouch in the bow and stare out over the ocean. When the sun shone, undines rose from the water and frolicked around the prow. Sylphs swarmed around the mast and sails, and sprites and gnomes danced on deck or let a giggling Zandro chase them back and forth. At night, after he'd put the boy to bed, Salamander would return to the bow and watch waves as black as obsidian glittering in the silver light of enormous stars. At times a moon would rise, all purple and swollen. When the ship reaches port, he would remind himself, you'll have to search for the door, the wooden door bound with iron, and behind it lies the magical book.

  Often Meranaldar would come sit with him. At those times, particularly if the loremaster was asking him questions, Salamander would remember that he was awake, that this ship was taking him back to the Westlands, and that Marka had refused to come with him. He would burst into tears and sob until in a flurry of apologies Meranaldar would get up and leave him alone. The rhythm of the waves would seduce him again, and once more he would believe that he slept and dreamt.

  He could not keep track of days. Since the sailors often mentioned their good luck in the weather, he could assume that they were travelling fast. They put in at Myleton, on the north Bardekian coast, to reprovision, then headed out due north, sailing mostly by the positions of the stars, or so Salamander heard them say. The days merged into one long stretch of sunlight with his son's laughter for music. The nights melded into a long torment of black sea and the splash of waves, a funeral dirge for his lost love. I will go back, he would tell himself. I'll find the book behind the wood door, and then I'll be able to go back to my family. Yet out of the waves would rise silver monsters, all gleaming teeth and red eyes, to mock him and tell him that he'd never see Bardek again.

  At last, when the food was nearly gone and the water was running short, in a bright morning seagulls wheeled around the ship and cried out greetings. As he leaned over the bow, Salamander could see an occasional long trail of seaweed in the murky water or the bobbing wood of sea wrack. Humming under his breath, a smiling Meranaldar joined him.

  “Almost there,” Meranaldar said. “The homeland! Ah ye gods, never did I dream that I'd actually make this voyage, no matter how much I longed for it.”

  “Are we going to the cities, then?” Salamander said.

  “No, we're landing in Elditiña, or whatever it's called now.”

  “Eldidd.”

  “Eldidd.” Meranaldar rolled the name around his mouth as if he were tasting wine. “Evandar gave our captain a map, you see. There's a cove with a wooden pier, he said, and a town called Cannobaen. Nearby is an island called Wmmglaedd.”

  “I know them both. You'll like Wmmglaedd. The priests there have books, a veritable treasure-house of lore.”

  “I'll look forward to going there, then, after we make landfall at Cannobaen.” All at once Meranaldar frowned. “I was hoping that Evandar would come to us and perhaps guide us in. But oh well, there's no accounting for the Guardians. They do what they please.”

  “If we find ourselves off course, all we have to do is follow the coast.”

  Yet that night, as they stood in the prow and looked forward to a dark line of land on the horizon, they saw a light burning to the north of them, a tiny spark from this distance.

  “There's Cannobaen,” Salamander said. “I remember now. The Cannobaen light. It marks a treacherous shoal just west of the town.”

  When morning came Salamander could see the white chalk cliffs and the stone dun perched on top, about the size of his thumb from this distance. The sight of the sandy beach and the pale cliff rising beyond overcame Meranaldar. He stood next to Salamander and let tears run down his face while he muttered an ancient prayer. At Salamander's direction, the helmsman steered toward the east, and soon they saw the harbor, a notch in the coastline, and its long wooden pier. Behind it stood houses, round and thatched, marching up the gentle slope of the town. The captain ordered the mast unstepped and stowed, and under oars the longship glided in to Can-nobaen. Salamander took Zandro amidships, where they'd be as much out of the way as possible. Taronaleriel, the captain, took up his place at the bow and watched the coast coming ever closer without saying a word, but he was grinning like a madman. Even the sailors bending to the oars appeared to smile as they worked.

  Suddenly the captain broke his silence and sang out orders. The sailors shipped oars and let the longship glide up to the pier. Carrying hawsers two sailors leapt for the bleached-silver pier. It trembled but it held their weight. The normal routine of bringing a ship in took over; men laughed and called out to one another as they tied the long-ship up and dropped anchor. Salamander handed Zandro to Meranaldar, climbed onto the pier, then leaned down and took the boy, swinging him up to stand beside him. Zandro was frightened enough to take his father's hand without fuss. Meranaldar followed them up.

  “Look!” Meranaldar pointed. “Someone's here to greet us.”

  Sure enough, at the far end of the pier stood a small clot of people, elven and human both. When he recognized Devaberiel, his father, once again Salamander believed himself dreaming. The light seemed all wrong, as well, a brilliant glitter that washed out colors and danced upon the pier and the town beyond. Through this ghastly light Devaberiel strode toward him, followed by a woman Salamander vaguely remembered as Dallandra. But who was that young man with them, who walked so straight and so proudly, with his dark hair ruffling in the wind and his violet eyes? Around his neck he wore a golden pendant, set with a sapphire—a figure fit for a dream.

  Devaberiel laughed and broke into a run. Salamander stood dazed as Devaberiel threw his arms around him and pulled him close. the pressure of his arms, the warmth of his body, made Salamander realize that he was indeed awake— awake and back in Deverry.

  “Ah ye gods!” Devaberiel said. “My son, my son!” Tears were glistening in his eyes. “I'm so glad to see you.”

  “And I'm glad to see you, Father. Here. This is one of your grandsons.”

  “A fine-looking boy!”

  When Devaberiel held out his arms, Zandro allowed himself to be picked up. Behind them Salamander heard something of a commotion. He turned to find the rest of the crew disembarking, calling out, and hurrying forward. Meranaldar and the captain both were staring at the young man. Meranaldar took one step toward him, then knelt with bowed head. Trembling, the captain did the same.

  “What?” Salamander said to his father. “Who's that?”

  “Daralanteriel tran Aladeldar,” Devaberiel said. “You don't recognize him, do you? He was only a child when you left.”

  “So he was! But what are they doing?”

  “I'm not sure.” Devaberiel glanced this way and that, saw Dallandra and called out to her. “What's the meaning of this, Wise One?”

  Dallandra hurried over, her mouth tight-set in anger. For a moment she watched Meranaldar, staring up at a totally flustered Prince Dar, and once again the scribe was weeping.

  “Curse Evandar anyway!” she snarled at last. “He might have warned me. Devaberiel, these men are descendants of our people, the ones who escaped from the sack of Rinbaladelan by boat. They eventually found their way to Bardek. They thought the lineages of the seven kings had all died out, and now here they are, faced with Ranadar's heir.”

  Devaberiel tried to speak, then merely stared slack-mouthed.

  “This is going to change everything,” Dallandra said. “Don't you see? For over a thousand years we've lived here, and they've lived there, and we each never knew the other existed. Now we're meeting.”

  “I do see.” Devaberiel recovered his voice at last. “The Westlands border will never be the same.”

  “Just so.” For a moment Dallandra stood silently, watching the ship's crew as they climbed onto the pier. “I don't suppose Evandar even realized what he was
setting in motion, but even if he had, he probably would have done it anyway, knowing him.” She tossed her head, as if shaking off a painful memory. “Well, there's no use in standing round here. Welcome home, Ebañy. We'll be sheltering tonight with your niece out at the dun.”

  “My thanks,” Salamander said. “It's a strange enough welcome, but truly, it gladdens my heart to be home.”

  Yet late that night, Salamander looked out of the window of his chamber high up in Cannobaen's broch. The moon laid a silver road upon the sea, a road that seemingly ran south to Bardek. He wept, thinking of his wife and family, so far away. Why had he left them? For a moment he hoped he was dreaming, but the scent of a real sea filled the room, and the stone of the windowsill felt rough against his fingers.

  “Alaena,” he whispered. “Marka. Will I meet you again someday, my love, when we both have different faces, different names?”

  All at once he felt so exhausted that he sat down on the straw-covered floor. He leaned against the cold stone wall and fell asleep, right where he was, to dream that he stood on a mountain peak and called out to a dragon, silver-skinned but touched here and there with blue.

  THE FIRE DRAGON

  A Bantam Spectra Book / January 2001

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 2001 by Katharine Kerr

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48487-1

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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