“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just put it on.”
“Oh, aye,” said Black-Arse. “And now for the hard part. How are ye going to get back up here?”
“Could you lower your shirt, or something? Don’t worry, you don’t have to haul me up, I just need a bit of support.”
He tried. But his shirt wasn’t long enough.
“It’ll have to be your trousers, then.”
“Davin, if ye think I am going to stand here with my rump showing just because you—”
“Black-Arse. Just do it. We have a dragon to kill, all right?”
He sighed. But in the end it took both his trousers and the white sheet, knotted together, to give me the purchase I needed.
“Never do that again!” Black-Arse told me once I was finally back on the same bit of rock with him.
I held out his leather trousers. And grinned into the darkness.
“What now? What are ye laughing at now?”
“You. I don’t know. Maybe we got your name wrong. Maybe we should really call you Bare-Arse.”
For a moment, he looked as if he wanted to push me back over the edge again. But then he started laughing too. We sat there on the mountainside and laughed till our stomachs hurt. That’s the brilliant thing about Black-Arse. At heart, he is crazier than I am.
Finally we pulled ourselves together and climbed the last bit of the way to the hare rock. Black-Arse carefully lifted two clay jars out of the rucksack. They didn’t look very big, I thought.
“Are you sure this will be enough?” I asked.
“Master Maunus says so. And he is good at calculating things like that on paper.”
Quite possibly. But we needed it to work in real life too.
Black-Arse brought out some metal spikes, a small hammer, and a coil of rope. Carefully he hammered the spikes into the rock and tied the jars firmly in place. Then he uncoiled the fuse from the jars. It was quite long and smelled as if it had been coated with tar or something.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yes.”
I fished out the tinderbox I had carried in my belt. At the second attempt, I succeeded in striking a spark and making it catch. The small flame eagerly ate at the fuse, working its way toward the jars.
“Off ye go,” said Black-Arse. “No time to hang about.”
We ran and climbed as fast as we could, until we were a fair distance from the hare rock. Then we waited.
“How long?” I asked.
“Any second,” said Black-Arse breathlessly. “Shut up now!” As if I was spoiling something by talking. Perhaps he was listening to the slight sizzle of the burning fuse.
Then something dawned on me.
“Black-Arse?”
He sighed. “Yes?”
“If the rope was in the rucksack all the time, why didn’t we use that instead of your trousers?”
He looked at me, open-mouthed.
“The rope in the pack.” He started laughing. “I forgot about it!”
And right then there was a sharp crack from the jars. It was nowhere near as loud as I had expected, and I was a little disappointed. Was that all?
Then there was a creaking sound. Then a huge and hollow boom. And then the rock trembled beneath us, as a whole mountainside’s load of snow tore loose and tumbled down toward the pass.
“Holy Saint Magda,” I whispered. “Look. Black-Arse, look!”
It was like a floodtide, a huge wave of white and gray, of snow and dirt and rock, roaring down, falling so quickly that the little people at the bottom of the pass had no time to run. Nor did the dragon. It raised its head and opened its jaws, and I think it probably hissed. But then the snowslide hit it, and the monster down there was devoured by another monster, a huge white death many, many times bigger than any dragon.
“Was that you?” said the guards on the wall as we returned.
“Was that you, lads?”
“Aye. That it was,” said Black-Arse proudly. “And let me tell ye, that dragon looked quite surprised.”
I didn’t say anything. My ankle had begun to hurt again, and the arm was smarting too. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, because I was all out of dragon’s blood.
“The whole pass is full of snow,” said one of the guards. “But is it too much to hope that ye got all of them?”
I shook my head. “At the most a few hundred. But the dragon is dead, so he can’t use that threat anymore. And they must clear a passage through the snowslide before they can do anything else. We have gained time, at least.”
“Aye,” said the guard. “That we have. Two days. Might be three, even. Nice work, lads.”
But in the middle of that brief triumph was the nagging worry that they must surely be feeling too. Two days, maybe three. And what then?
The fever came back. I lay in the sick bay, trembling with it, heaving with nightmares, and sometimes I heard Drakan’s voice as if he was standing right next to the bed. If he drinks it himself, he is mine. And at other times I couldn’t help thinking, Does he have a supply of dragon’s blood out there, does he have just one more small bottle? And then I was about ready to march right out of Skayark and sneak down to the Dragon camp to steal it from him. Once I got as far as the sick bay door before Rose and Mama stopped me. And all the time the voices were whispering, louder than ever.
… your name is murderer…
… how many dead now…
And I heard myself telling the guards on the wall: At the most a few hundred.
The snow ate them. The white death devoured them like it devoured the dragon. And they might not all have been Dragon knights. Maybe there were men who had been forced to serve in the same way as the Arlain fishermen. People who had families somewhere, children and mothers and wives who missed them. The white death we had roused did not distinguish between good and evil and everything in between. It ate everyone. I couldn’t even be sure there were no children among the dead.
Maybe I’m not suited to war after all, I thought in a brief, clear moment between attacks. No more than Nico is. And after a while another thought struck: What if no one really is? But what do you do when war still comes?
The fever wouldn’t go down. Mama fed me willow bark tea by the barrel. She and Rose packed snow into pillowcases and tucked them around me, but nothing helped. I burned. I trembled. I sweated so much they had to change the sheets every other hour.
That night—or was it the next? Time had become slippery, impossible to track. But it was night, that much I was sure of, and Mama was standing at the foot of my bed.
“Look at me, Davin.”
She wasn’t using her Shamer’s voice, but I still couldn’t deny her.
“Was it dragon blood?”
Then I knew that Rose had been telling tales. I didn’t say anything, but she read the answer in my eyes.
I closed them, knowing I deserved the contempt she was sure to feel for me right then.
I think it happened a few hours later. I was dozing when I suddenly heard my mother’s voice:
“Dina?”
I opened my eyes. The sick bay looked normal. My bed, Callan’s bed, and the chair Mama had placed more or less halfway between them. But no trace of my little sister.
Mama had risen. She was staring into empty air, but I couldn’t tell what she was looking at.
“Where are you?” she said. And it wasn’t me or Callan she was talking to. Her eyes flicked this way and that, searching, and there was something about the way she didn’t see me that made chills run down my back.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
Callan had his blanket off and was halfway out of his bed.
“Melussina?” he said. “Melussina, what is happening?”
But Mama didn’t hear him.
“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, looking around her uncertainly. “I can’t see you.”
Callan hauled himself to his feet and took her arm.
“I’
m right here,” he said. But I think he knew that she wasn’t talking to him. He glanced at me.
“Lad? Can you fetch us Rose?”
“I can try.”
But before I had time to find out whether my legs would carry me or not, there was a brief gasp from my mother.
“Dina! Of course I do!”
And then she closed her eyes. And a moment later she dropped where she stood.
And no matter how much we called, she would not answer, nor wake again.
DINA
True Dreams
It takes time to get anywhere when you are an army, even though it is a very small army. The snow made the going difficult for people and animals, and the closer we got to the Highlands, the deeper it became.
“How long is it till midwinter?” I asked Nico on the second morning, while we were struggling with our packs. With frozen fingers and buckles and straps made difficult by the cold, packing up was a bit of a battle in itself.
He had to think. “Twenty days, I think. No wait, twenty-one.”
I nodded gloomily and looked up at the charcoal sky. “That’s what I thought.”
“Why do you ask?” said Tano.
“Oh, nothing. Just wondering.”
But Nico had caught it, quick as he was with things like that.
“It’s your birthday today,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“You are thirteen years old today.” Nico shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dina. It had completely slipped my mind.”
“It doesn’t matter. There are a few things around here that are slightly more important.”
Tano looked surprised. “Thirteen? I thought you were older.”
“Why? I mean, I look small.” And square and trollish and… not very womanly.
“You seem older. The way you act. The things you say.”
Was that good or bad? Mostly good, probably.
Nico had begun to undo the pack he had just succeeded in closing. He rummaged around in there and brought out a small leather purse.
“Here,” he said. “I don’t know if it fits, but, well, happy birthday, anyway. And may you celebrate it in better circumstances next year.”
It was a ring. A ring with his family seal on it, the raven.
“It was my brother’s,” he said. “It passed to me when he died, but I’ve never really worn it.”
Nico’s older brother had been killed in a bandit ambush several years ago. The older brother who had been his father’s heir, the older brother who had been good at all the things Nico hated, swords and fighting and competitions. Was that why Nico hadn’t worn the ring? But it was silver and really very nice, even if it was a bit too big, having been made to fit a man’s hand and not a girl’s.
“I’ll have to wear it round my neck,” I said. “Or I’ll lose it.” I untied the leather thong that held my Shamer’s signet and threaded it through the ring. Then the signal to move off came down from the front, and I had to hurry with the last stubborn buckles before I could get back on Azuan’s brown mare.
The snow kept coming. It was hard to see where we were going, particularly for the riders in front. The rest of us could just hunch down and follow. The trail rose more steeply with every mile. This was the proper Highlands now.
“Who is the damn fool who decided to have a winter war?” growled one of the archers. “You can barely string a bow without ruining it.”
The winter war was Drakan’s idea. But of course the archer knew that.
Suddenly there was shouting and commotion at the head of the file, and then the sound of sword against sword.
“Arms!” shouted someone, while others just yelled their heads off.
What was happening? Was it Drakan? But we were nowhere near Baur Laclan…
Then I heard the voice of the Weapons Master rise above the clamor.
“Hold! Put up your swords! These are not enemies. Hold, I said!”
Not enemies? I set my heels to the brown mare, and she leaped forward, already excited at the noise.
“Please let me past,” I called, and then, when that did no good, “Make way. Step aside!”
That did it. People leaped aside as if they were fleeing a mad dog. But at least it got me through to the head of the column, so that I could see what was going on.
The Weapons Master was standing between two lots of men, all of them scowling fiercely at one another. One man on our side had a wounded arm, I could see; the blood ran down his arm and dripped into the snow. But at least no one was fighting at the moment. These were not Drakan’s men at all. They were Highlanders, in Laclan cloaks.
“Laclan,” I said, searching their faces for one I knew, “we’re not your enemies. Quite the opposite.”
“That is easy to say,” said a man who seemed far too ancient to wield a sword. “Ye look like enemies to me. Ye look like an army, so ye do.”
“But we are not Drakan’s army,” I said. “You might even know me? Dina Tonerre, who lives with the Kensies? Helena Laclan knows me.”
There was a muttering among the Laclans.
“Aye,” one of them admitted. “We know you. The Shamer’s lass. But what about the rest of ye?”
“We’ve come to help,” I said. And then, although I knew it sounded foolish with an army of only a few hundred people: “We’ve come to beat Drakan.”
The old man barked with laughter. “With that lot?” he said. “Do ye know how many men he has?”
“Yes,” said Nico, who had reached the head of the line too, now. “He left with eight thousand. I don’t know how many are left.”
“Fewer than when he came,” said one of the Laclan men with grim satisfaction.
“So Laclan has not surrendered?” I said.
The old man looked offended.
“I thought ye said ye knew us.”
It was the Laclans who told us that Drakan had gone from Baur Laclan and had left only what he thought was enough men to hold the castle.
“And he is wrong about that, I think,” said the old man. “Another couple of days, and they’ll be ripe for picking. But Helena says we must not take back the castle while Drakan is still in the Highlands.”
Nico looked thoughtful. “That is wise,” he said. “Let them do the taking and the holding. We are too few for that.”
“That is what Helena says,” growled the old man. “But it is hard on the little ones and the sick and the old, hiding in the mountains at this time of year. We cannot go on forever.”
“Perhaps that is why he made it a winter war,” said Nico. “In the summer, this would be much easier for you.”
“Where has he gone, then?” I asked, my heart cold with fear.
“Skayark,” said the old man. “He is laying siege to Skayark. But that is not a nut he will easily crack.”
Nico looked less convinced. “Drakan does not wage his war like other people would,” he said. “If there is a way to bring Skayark to fall, he will find it. Poison, treachery, hostages, anything. He will do whatever it takes to win.”
The Weapons Master frowned. “That is true,” he said. “I suppose we must head for Skayark, then. To see if we can find a crack in his armor and a place to aim our sting.”
It took us another two days to reach the Skayler Pass. And the sight that met us there was enough to discourage even the fiercest wasp.
From mountainside to mountainside, like a river that had flooded its banks. Men. Thousands of men. And most of them with swords from the smithies of Dracana.
“We are not an army,” said Nico softly. “We are just a bunch of people. This… this is what a real army looks like.” And then he suddenly stiffened. “What is that?”
“That” was a row of children, children in black Dragon uniforms. And they were training, some with swords, others with crossbows and spears.
“It looks like children,” I said. “With weapons.”
“Will he… will he use them?” Even though Nico was the one who had sai
d that Drakan would do whatever it took, there was now disbelief in his voice. “He will use children to fight his war?”
“Probably he will,” I said, because I didn’t think Drakan would waste clothes and weapons and training on anyone he didn’t mean to use.
We had both been flat on our stomachs in the snow behind an outcrop of rock. Now he stood up, seeming not to care who saw him.
“That does it,” he said in a strangely absentminded tone of voice. “I have had enough of this.” And he started walking toward the Dragon Force.
“Nico!” I ran after him. “Nico, stop!”
“He is the one who has to be stopped.”
“But, Nico, no. They’ll just kill you.”
“Not without letting me see him. Not without letting me near.”
“And then what will you do? Bite him? Because you don’t really expect them to let you keep a weapon, do you?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He tore his arm from my grasp and continued.
“Nico. Nico, damn it! I’ll do it. Stop, please! I’ll do it for you.”
“You can’t. What you can do doesn’t work on him.”
“But it works on everybody else!”
A couple more steps and not even the blindest Dragon man could miss us. It was a wonder we had not already been spotted.
“If you go down there, so do I!”
He stopped.
“No, Dina. You won’t.”
We stared at each other.
“Won’t I?” I hissed. “Look at me, Nico. Don’t you believe me?”
He had gone deathly pale, but he couldn’t look away.
“Dina—”
“Can you see yourself now?” I asked. “Can you see how stupid and how… how spoiled you’re being right now? ‘The world is not like I want it to be, so I might as well die.’ Is that your phrase of the day? Because you know this won’t work. You know you won’t get him this way.”
He dropped to his knees in the snow and finally lowered his eyes.
“But what am I going to do?” he said. “Because I can’t stand this, Dina. I really can’t.”
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