by E. P. Clark
Joki said that my preparations to leave should take no more than a day, and he was depressingly correct. I had always thought I was tightly woven into the fabric of my village, but by mid-afternoon the next day I had already packed up my clothes, written to my family, and informed everyone whom I thought needed informing of what had happened. No one even seemed that surprised, or that sorry to see me go. Not because they disliked me, but because they all had their own concerns, and as long as they didn’t need me, I did not enter into them. I was a convenience, like a hired horse, and like a hired horse, could be easily abandoned when the time came.
We set off the next morning, me, Joki, and Joki’s horse, who was a ewe-necked, swaybacked bay gelding named Tähti and who hardly looked strong enough to pull Joki’s cart, which was as shabby as his clothes.
“What do you feed him?” I demanded when I saw Tähti.
“Whatever the hostlers give him,” said Joki, pulling at his ear and looking uncomfortable. “Or whatever he can graze.”
“He needs good hay,” I said severely. “And oats in small quantities, mixed in with a nice bran mash to keep him from colicking.”
Joki shrugged. “Be my guest,” he told me. “If you can get those things for him, I won’t complain.” He climbed into the cart, his shoulders radiating an unwillingness to speak more on the subject.
“I’ll walk,” I told him. “We’ll probably go faster that way anyway.”
Joki’s shoulders radiated even more unwillingness to get into a discussion as they shrugged in irritated acquiescence. And so we set off from the village with Tähti leading the way at a slow amble, and me, as I had predicted, easily keeping pace on foot behind.
It was a beautiful fall day, with a bright blue sky overhead and a chill wind hinting at winter blowing down from the mountains. The trees were just turning their colors, and the air promised changing seasons and hard times ahead. Which everyone always knew about autumn, and yet somehow loved it anyway.
Joki was supposed to visit three more villages, he told me, but now that he had found me, he was going to escort me directly to the mountains instead.
“I’m unlikely to find anyone there,” he said. “And I don’t want to risk you, do I?”
“Is the journey likely to be that risky?” I asked. “The war is far away, and I haven’t heard reports of bandits in these parts for a long time.”
“All journeys are risky,” he told me, looking off at the sky. “I’ll feel better once we’re safely home.”
I wanted to argue that where we were going was no home to me, but I refrained. We walked in silence for the rest of the morning. Then we ate in silence at midday, and walked on in silence for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes I broke the silence by asking Joki about himself or about where we were heading, but he would only tell me that there was nothing interesting about his story, and I would find out soon enough about my new home when I got there. So I wrapped up as best I could against the wind that was blowing harder and harder, tearing the turning leaves from the trees and whipping away the warmth from the bright sun, and looked to the left and the right as we moved farther and farther away from the only place I had ever called home.
In midafternoon we turned away from the fields we had been walking through, and began to climb up a gentle wooded incline. So deceptively mild was the entrance into the mountains. The hill and the trees gave us shelter from the wind, and the sun shining on our backs, combined with the climb, warmed us properly for the first time that day.
“We’ll have to camp out for the night,” Joki announced abruptly, as the shadows were growing across the road. “No inns along here. Not till we make it to the pass.”
“How far is the pass?” I asked.
“Two more days to the first one. Then three days to the next. And then three more days to...”
“So mainly camping,” I said. “In the cold. And probably the rain.”
“Is that a problem? I didn’t take you for a finicky city girl.”
“If you’ve ever seen the city, you’d know that no one who made it their home could ever be called finicky.”
Joki broke into a smile for the first time that day. “True enough,” he agreed. “Well, no need to worry. The cart makes a decent enough bed. Or you can sleep under it, if you prefer.”
I opened my mouth to ask more about the sleeping arrangements, but, faced with Joki’s uncomfortable shoulders, shut it again. We would come to our agreement when we stopped. When he thought I wasn’t paying attention, I would catch Joki looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as he always had ever since I had become old enough to catch his attention. I wondered how much the fact that he was old enough to be my father would restrain him. Or just considerations of common decency. I wondered how much common decency he or any of the other men I was soon to meet would have. Probably even less than the men I had already met in my life, so precious little. Joki didn’t seem that dangerous, but...he was a dragon-sorcerer. Presumably in any fight against me or any other ordinary human, he would win. So I would have to rely on my cunning and his better feelings.
“Do you have any children?” I asked, hoping to stoke those better feelings.
“No.” He was looking off at the sky again. “Not that I know of. Maybe. None with the blood. So no.”
“Children without the blood are still children! They’re still yours! They still matter!”
“Yes,” he agreed, still looking off at the sky. “And no. You’ll find out when your time comes.”
I wanted to argue against that very hard, but I was afraid to remind him any more than he was already reminded that I certainly had the blood, even if none of his possible children did, and that, according to him, I would always breed true. So I swallowed back my arguments and ran over to the edge of the road to look through a break in the trees down to where we had been.
The valley spread out below in the soft beige squares of harvested fields, broken by the occasional burst of red from the maple groves. The slope we were on was covered in golden birches, warmed by the setting sun, which was releasing the scent of falling leaves.
“Can you see far from...there?” I asked, returning to Joki and giving him the question as a peace offering. “Does it have views like this?”
He shook his head. “All you can see is the peaks above, and the gorge below,” he told me. “A harsh view, and closed in. The mountains are not always a place of freedom.”
“So what’s the point, if there’s no freedom?” I asked.
“Power,” he told me, looking at me directly for the first time that day. “Knowledge and power. And health and wealth, of course, but that’s not what interests you, is it?”
I shook my head, a tiny movement. Health I had always had in abundance, and I believed Joki when he told me that I was likely to live a long life. They said that dragon-sorcerers could live forever, but forever was too long to imagine. A hundred years or so seemed enough to me now, barely a third of the way through that journey. And wealth held little attraction: what could I buy with coin that my healthy body couldn’t already give me? Even power...power to do what? There was no one I wanted to kill, no realms I wanted to rule. But knowledge...
“Was it knowledge for you, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said after a time, looking down. “Or so I would claim. The truth is, Laela, that if the blood is in you, you cannot say no to it. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the blood, and no one can deny it.”
I shivered. The cold wind coming down from the mountaintops, I told myself. It was blowing hard enough to ripple the water of the horse ponds in the fields below; more than enough to give me chills. “Enough of that,” I said. “We should look for a place to stop, if we’re going to be stopping by the side of the road for the night.”
“There’s a campsite up around the next turn,” Joki told me. “If we’re lucky we’ll be alone there.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, although there was neither threat nor promise i
n his words, but I silently hoped that we would not be alone. I silently hoped that there would be a noisy family party camping there with us. A couple of crying babes would make things safe for everyone, and lost sleep could always be made up later.
But when we came to the campsite, which was simply a wide flat spot carved out into the hillside by the side of the road, with a trickle of water running down the hill into a pool next to it, no one else was there. Joki unharnessed Tähti, brushed him down in a very desultory fashion, and set him to grazing on the sparse grass.
“Don’t you have any feed for him?” I asked.
“There’s grass.”
“No wonder he’s so thin!”
Joki gave me no reply other than to look away guiltily.
“He’ll never get up the mountain if we don’t feed him properly,” I said.
“He’s always managed before,” Joki said, still looking away guiltily.
“And then one day he won’t. Where are you stores?”
“I told you, I don’t have any horse feed.”
“But you must have human feed.” I went over to the cart and started rummaging through it, turning up, as I suspected, oats for porridge and barley for stew. There was a short sharp argument between me and Joki over feeding that to Tähti, which I won by walking off with the sacks in my arms. Joki called after me that we would be hungry and it would be my fault, but didn’t dare come and wrest the grain from me by main force.
When I returned from feeding Tähti, though, he had something clutched in his hands, and a strange light in his eyes.
“I’ve been debating within myself whether to start this on the road, or wait till we arrive,” he told me. “But since you’re so bursting with health and strength, we can start now. You’ll probably survive it. And it will help you pass the tests when we get there.”
“What is it?” I demanded.
He uncupped his hands, showing me the little glass vial of red liquid. Red lit our faces, and the whole campsite. Sunset, I told myself. A few drops of liquid could never make that much of a glow.
“You should drink more,” he told me. “A drop every day, to give you strength and to speed the change.”
“Change?”
He wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably. “You are not simply born a dragon, Laela. Well, you are, or rather, you are born with the blood and the gift, but that is not enough. You have to undergo the training. You have to undergo the change.”
“What change?” He didn’t look very changed to me, but perhaps I was missing something. Perhaps it was one of those things where fancy people used fancy words to dress up things that weren’t very fancy or exciting or interesting at all.
“You...the training...you have to change...”
“Change in what way?”
“It will make you stronger,” he said, not looking me in the eye. “That’s all. It will make you stronger.”
“But it will make me weaker first?” I guessed.
“A bit. Sometimes. It can make you...sometimes you don’t feel so good...but you will be fine. I’m sure of it. You will be fine, and you’ll have it over with by the time we arrive, and that will make the training easier, and you’ll be ahead of everyone else. Come here, Laela.” He raised his eyes and looked me straight in the face. “Come here, Laela, and take it. It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.”
I walked over to him, why I couldn’t say. My feet no longer seemed like my feet.
“Only a drop,” he cautioned, holding the vial up to my lips. “One drop, no more.” He tilted the vial.
FIRE!
I was clutching onto the cart to keep from falling. Joki was watching me with dispassionate concern.
“Why does it do that?” I asked. “It was like...being suddenly squeezed all over...or struck by lightning...”
“It just does,” he told me.
“Will it get better?”
“It will. Once you stop taking it. Now come. Let’s see if you’ve left any food for us.”
I tried to get Joki to tell me more about the red liquid and its effects as he made supper—despite his dire words there was no shortage of food for the humans as well as for Tähti—but he put me off with stories that seemed to twist me around more and more as I felt odder and odder, till I accused him of poisoning me.
“No,” he said. “Not like what you mean. It’s the change, working on you. It makes you feel a bit sick at times, is all. But a strong girl like you, I’m sure you’ll survive. Now go to bed, and you’ll feel better in the morning.”
I wanted to argue with him, demand more answers from him, insist on promises that he wouldn’t harm me in the night, but none of the words would come out right, so I crawled over to the cart and made up my bed underneath it, where I lay for a long time, both sleeping and waking, dreaming and seeing, until the stars came out and the moon rose and set, dragging me down into darkness with it.
3
I expected to feel too sick to walk the next morning, but when I crawled out from under the cart into the early-morning chill, I felt lighter, lighter than I had ever felt before. I thought of the dragonbone wand and how light it had felt in my hands.
Nonsense! I told myself firmly. This is always how you feel after an illness! You won’t take any more of that nasty red stuff, no matter what Joki says or does, and that will be the end of it. I looked over to where Joki was sleeping in the cart. He hadn’t bothered to take off his boots, and an empty bottle of wine was lying beside him. I could just start walking back down the mountain, and by the time he came to and realized what had happened, I would be long gone. He probably wouldn’t even bother to try to come after me.
Tähti came over to me, pulling on his tether and whickering hopefully into my hands, looking for more grain.
“If I leave, what will happen to you?” I asked him, and set about starting up a fire for breakfast.
By the time Joki had roused himself and stumbled out of the cart, I had made a steaming porridge, most of which I gave to Tähti. Joki looked at what I gave him and made a disgusted face before feeding his portion to Tähti as well.
“If you didn’t drink so much each night, you wouldn’t feel so ill in the morning,” I told him sternly.
“I only accept that kind of nagging from my wife,” he said.
“So you do have a wife, then?” I asked, hoping he would say “Yes.” Somehow I felt that men with wives were more trustworthy, even though I knew they could be just as untrustworthy as any other man.
“No. Are you offering to take up the office? Because you already nag like one.”
“I’m not a wife. I’m a healer. I nag everybody.”
“True enough.” He took the tea I gave him, sniffed at it, and poured the last of last night’s wine into the mug. I bit my lips and deliberately said nothing. He smiled a little into the steam.
“Truth be told, it’s nice to have someone around who cares enough to nag,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” I wanted to ask about the strange lightness, but I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, which was sad and tender, like a father and a husband all at once, and I didn’t want to make the lightness real by talking about it. So I just said “Fine” again and busied myself with washing up and putting out the fire and getting the camp ready for us to set off, while Joki sat there and sipped his wine and tea in silent sadness. Then I was mad at myself for doing all the work when he didn’t deserve it, but by the time that thought had come to me, I was already done and we were ready to go.
Joki tried to get me to ride in the cart with him, but I said no, I could walk better than Tähti could pull me, and so we started up the road again, heading into the morning shadows as the sun slowly climbed its way up the other side of the mountains, waiting until midday to burst free and greet us.
When we stopped to rest, we were overtaken by two men in a cart even shabbier than ours, pulled by a horse even skinnier and sadder-looking than poor Tähti. The men themselves were no better,
with scraggly gray beards that appeared to be the result of laziness rather than planning, and clothes that must not have been washed for a month.
“That’s a pretty one you’ve got there, Joki,” one of them called to us. “What’d you do: tell her she had the gift to get her to come with you?”
“That’s your trick, Heikki,” said Joki. He turned away from the men, showing no interest in talking to them as they plodded past, even though he clearly knew them.
“So she does have the gift, then?” called Heikki, who seemed unable to take the hint.
“More than you, that’s for sure,” Joki shouted back. “But then, so does my horse.”
Heikki’s lips thinned. I wanted to tell Joki not to rile him, not to make them mad or draw any attention to me, but he shouted several things of that ilk after Heikki’s back as it retreated down the road away from us.
“They’re dangerous,” I said once they were out of sight. “We shouldn’t make them mad.”
“Dangerous they are,” Joki agreed. “But only for the weak.”
“How do you know them?”
Joki said nothing as we gathered up our things, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but he said abruptly, once we had started walking, “We started the training together. But only I finished.”
“Oh,” I said. “So...what happens to those who fail? I thought...I thought they...died.”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just fail, and have to make their way in the world with that burden on their shoulders. Some would say that’s worse than death.”
“That’s just silly.”