Dragon's Winter (10 page)

How do I know that? she wondered. I would not have known it yesterday. She touched the soft lining of the cloak. Nor did I have this yesterday. Bare, horn-hard feet poked out from beneath the cloak’s bottom hem. The juxtaposition made her smile, and the curve of her lips felt strange. She touched her mouth. How long had it been since she had smiled, or spoken, or slept in a bed? She gazed wonderingly at the tough, weathered skin of her hands. She did not remember their aging.

The rest of the day she roamed the city. The soldiers followed her. She walked across the bridges where the river cut through the city like a silver band. She went to the market, weaving through the bustle, staring at the piled goods, cloth and rope and kettles, and the horses in their stalls, and at the tall heaped baskets of apples and pears and sweet white corn, for the early harvest was in. She stopped at a stall hung with mirrors, and gazed at them. Her skin was darker than that of those around her: they were pale; she was bronze. She saw a toy in a peddler’s cart: a rude carved dragon, with painted leather wings and a stubby tail. She held it a long time before returning it to the peddler. Wherever she went she felt people watching her. Once a tall man in elegant clothes tried to speak to her. The soldiers shouldered quickly between them, and the older one spoke urgently to the tall man. The man had tears in his eyes.

The pictures returned, small and far away, as if they retreated into the past she could barely remember. But others replaced them, bright, colorful, and clear: a black dragon with a scarlet crest soaring over the city, and a silver rain falling onto the roofs and burning, and steam boiling white from the river.

At the end of the day, under the soft blue summer sky, she turned to the patient soldiers. “Now,” she said.

They guided her to the castle, up white marble steps that gleamed red in the hazy sunset. They led her through shining hallways floored with polished wood that was slippery to her feet, and ushered her into a room in which a lordly man sat waiting.

“My lord,” said the older soldier, “we have brought her.” Both men bowed and left. Light shone through tall uncurtained windows, warming the wood, filling the room with the scent of new oak and oil. Sunlight gilded the floorboards.

The man rose from his high-backed chair. He had a spade-shaped black beard in which bits of grey curled like ash. His face was weathered with sun and wind. He wore blue and amber silk, and carved riding boots, and his sword belt was worn with handling in the way the older soldier’s was. “My lady wizard,” he said gravely. “Welcome to Mako Castle. Do you know me?”

She searched her memory: found a face like this man’s, but older, grey and fierce, with white unseeing eyes. She said, “Erin diMako. You look like your father.”

She saw him catch his breath. Then, moving to the wide oak table, he filled two cups from a silver pitcher, and brought her one of them. The wine was light and sweet and flavored with honey. “There’s food, if you are hungry.” He pointed to a platter that held slices of fruit and small pies filled with meat and mushrooms. A wind slid in and out the windows. A blue jay chattered from its perch on the coping. Soldiers paced the ramparts in measured steps.

When she had eaten her fill, she sat in the second chair. Erin diMako sat opposite her.

After a while, she said, into the silence, “Tell me.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said quietly. “We thought you might never wake.”

“We?”

“The physicians. The lesser magicians and hedge- witches to whom we spoke. All of us—the whole city—” He waved a hand toward the city scattered below the castle. “They found you in the street, unconscious, locked in profound slumber. No one could wake you. They brought you here, silent, sleeping, limp as a gillyflower. We would have kept you always in honor and comfort, here in the castle, but when at last you woke, you would not stay, and we could not persuade you, or restrain you—gods, we would have given you all the gold in the city for your guerdon, except that you would not take it!” He halted, and then resumed. “You vanished into the streets. You wore rags, and slept in alleys. You fought with the dogs for your dinner. You would take nothing from anyone, and you never, never would speak.”

“I was hurt,” she said. She touched her head. “Hurt, here.”

“The physicians said that you were injured in some deep and hidden place, and that if you were to heal, you would have to find the way to it yourself; they could not help. They counseled us to let you be.”

“Your father—does he still live?”

“He is dead,” said the lord. “But he lived long enough after the burning to know the rebirth of the city. We rebuilt it from the ashes, as you see. I inherited his place seventeen years ago. I married Nianne of Averra a year later. We have four daughters. No sons.”

“The city thrives.”

“I do what I can. Kalni Leminin is my overlord. My daughter Perdita married his brother’s second son. I am friend to the Talvelai, and to Danae Isheverin of Chuyo, and to Karadur Atani.”

“Karadur Atani.” The name resonated slowly through her mind. “The dragon’s son.”

“Yes. He is Dragon Keep’s lord, now. I think you will not have known him. He was only four when his father died.”

Black dragon battled golden dragon across a cobalt sky. “What manner of man is he?” she asked.

“Hard to say,” Erin diMako said. “Strong. Quick. Proud. At twelve, he had the strength and size of one near grown. He rode in my war band for two years, and I made him one of my captains. He has the habit of command, as did his father. There is no quarrel between us.” He leaned forward. “My lady, what woke you?”

“Ankoku.” The name was like ash on her tongue.

Erin diMako looked puzzled. “I beg your pardon?”

“The darkness,” she explained. But she could see he did not understand, and she did not have the energy to say more: speech was hard for her. She rose. So did he.

“Home,” she said. Her staff slid into her hand. “Plumeria Street.”

“My soldiers will escort you,” Erin diMako said promptly. Then he stretched a hand to her. “My lady—Lady Senmet—you are more than welcome to stay here. You do not have to sleep in the streets, or beg for bread in a brothel. Or if not here, any place of comfort. The city begs to do you honor.”

She shook her head. “Home.”

The soldiers came. She let them follow her through the streets of the twilit city, through marketplace and alleyway, to a familiar doorway. A scented oil lamp burned beside the gateway. The girls were giggling upstairs. She went into the kitchen. Kira glanced at her shyly.

“Hungry,” Senmet said, although she was not. She let the cloak slip from her shoulders, and sat at the table. “Bread?”

Beaming, Kira set a huge slice of cake in front of her. “There’s orange bits in it,” she said happily. “I made it for Anastasia; the sweetheart, it’s her fourteenth birthday. The girls held a party for her this noon, and Sicha gave her an emerald, a real emerald!”

Senmet shut the sounds out. Pictures slipped into her mind: a massive black castle looming out of the snow; a red-haired soldier standing in a circle of fire; a small child crouching, a chain around its galled neck.

In the north, in the cold, the darkness crowed its vengeful laughter.

6

Just before Shem’s first birthday, Wolf went north into the steppe-lands to set his traps.

Thea had suggested it, back in August. Wolf demurred, troubled that she and Shem would be alone. Since Shem’s birth, he had stayed close to home. “What if you run out of wood? What if you get sick?”

She laughed at him. “You worry too much. I am never sick.”

She said it again after the first frost. The morning was bright, cold as a knife-blade. They lay in bed, while a squirming, singing Shem navigated happily over their bodies. At intervals he halted, to thump the quilts and harangue his parents in no known language. “There is food, and wood enough in the woodpile for two months, let alone a week. Go set your snares. We will be fine.”

He left on a bright chilly morning. His sled, piled with snares, bumped at his heels. Just below Dragon Keep, warned by the jingle, he stepped from the path to let a small troop of soldiers trot past on their way to Chingura. He recognized Toby, and waved.

“Hoy!” the boy called. “Where are you off to, hunter?”

“North!” he shouted back. “Some of us work for a living!”

The path through the mountains was steep, but clearly marked. Past Dragon Keep, the weather changed. Snow began to fall, clogging the path with drifts. Stubbornly he persisted, dragging his sled with its burden of snares behind him.

A freeze that night forced him into wolf form. He lay all night on the lee side of a rock, thick brushy tail curled over mouth and nose. Dawn of the next day was cold. The sun hid behind a wall of cloud. Resuming human form, Wolf built a fire and ate some meat which he had brought with him. He was troubled. Something had changed. Two winters ago these hills had teemed with fox, lynx, marten, deer, and hare. In three days he had seen nothing living, save owls, field mice, and one mournful grey goose.

That afternoon he climbed the last ridge. As he reached the top, he halted, expecting to see, as he had two years back, a wide grassy sweep of land, clumped with small trees and grey-brown hillocks. Instead, he found ice.

At first he thought it a mirage. It spread before him, milk-white, under a milk-white sky in which there was no trace of blue. His breath crackled between his teeth. The landscape was silent: not the silence of rest and sleep, but the silence of death. The steppe was empty; the land plundered.

Shaken, wondering what had happened, he retraced his steps south.

Three nights after Wolf returned from the ice, a storm howled in across the mountains: no snow, just wind, a cold rage of wind. In midafternoon the light was so dim that it felt like night had come. Wind pounded clenched fists on the cottage, finding chinks in the house planks that it had not found before. The bed was the warmest place in the house: Thea took Shem under the blankets. Wolf fed the fire with logs, and put bricks in the warming pan.

He felt—something.

He knelt by the fire, unsure for a moment. He felt it again. Inside his head, a mind was crying, like a dream half-remembered. It came again, a fingernail scratching at a closed door, the sound of a spider web being spun. He banged the warming pan on the hearth tiles, cracking one. “Go away,” he said aloud. But it was still there.

He went to bed, burrowed in the covers beside Thea and the child.

The cry was there. Help me. I am here.

He kissed the soft nape of Thea’s neck, and rose. She murmured his name. “I’ll be back,” he said softly, and dressed, and went out into the slashing wind.

Wolf-shaped, he followed the cry. It led him toward the Keep. He gave himself up to it, trusting his wolf nature to keep him from killing himself on the spiny rocks. The wind howled as if it wanted to snatch him from the crags and send him spinning to his death. In his mind, the cry continued: wordless, desperate, alone.

At last, below the bear’s den in which he had slept while Thea was giving birth, he found a near-naked man sprawled on the stony ground.
Help me,
he whispered soundlessly.

Wolf changed, and laid a hand on the man’s left shoulder. The man was breathing, but his eyes were tight shut, and his pale skin was icy cold. His face was obscured by a tangle of beard and mud-caked hair.

“Hey,” Wolf said.

The man did not answer. He did not seem to hear. But inside Wolf’s mind, the terrible whispering stilled.

Wolf stood a moment, considering. The Keep loomed overhead. Lights flickered from windows and battlements: promising warmth, food, a bed. But it would be hard, and harder, especially this night, in the rampaging wind, to climb up than to go down. Crouching, Wolf gathered the stranger into his arms. The man weighed less than Thea. Steadily, calling on his wolf senses—balance, vision, strength—Wolf brought his burden down the mountain and into the meadow. He kicked the door.

Thea opened it. The wind whipped at her hair. Wolf carried the man inside, and laid him by the fire. “Who is he?” Thea asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know that either. I found him in the rocks.” He threw a log on the fire. Thea lit a candle, and brought a cloth from the kitchen. Wolf leaned lightly forward, and laid his ear against the stranger’s bare chest. The man breathed steadily, without the clotted sound that warned of infection in the lungs. Wolf felt his legs and feet. They were cold, but not, he thought, the frozen ice-like cold that means that the limbs have died.

“It’s going to hurt when he wakes,” he said. “If he wakes.”

“There’s blood on his legs,” Thea said. She made an odd noise. A blotchy patchwork of scars covered the man’s skin. His ribs were skeletal. “Oh, goddess. Look at his hands.” His fingers were knotted, broken, gnarled with red scars. Thea laid a gentle hand on the man’s cheek. “You’re safe now,” she said. “Can you hear me?” The long frame did not move. The closed eyes did not flicker. Thea ran upstairs, and came down with arms filled with her thickest blankets. “Help me,” she said, and Wolf helped her arrange the blankets around the sleeping man.