EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (199 page)

To say that the Drudders were cruel to her would be a lie. They never truly mistreated her. Nor could one say that they failed to provide for her. There was a roof over her head, and even a bed of her own. The drought meant that the food on the table was barely enough, but she always got an equal share. No, her new family gave her everything that they had to give her . . . and that was all. Her “brothers” barely glanced in her direction. Her “father” spoke only in directions regarding this task or that in the fields. She was never called by any name other than “Rinton girl,” or more often simply “you there.” For a girl so young, a girl who had lost her family so horribly and so quickly, the loneliness was pure agony.

Before long, Jade was reduced to wandering numbly through her day, quietly doing as she was told, eating her meager meals, and sleeping fitfully. She was in just such a daze, weeding the edge of the family land nearest to the trees, when she felt something. For a moment, it cut through the veil of malaise.

It wasn’t that she had seen something, or even heard something. There was simply a sensation . . . like something in the trees was watching her. She squinted into the sparse, dried out woods, but it was no use. The bright sun made the relative shade of the woods a veritable wall of darkness. Still, she could not shake the feeling. Moving slowly, she squeezed through the fence and crept closer to the trees. Her eyes began to adjust, cutting deeper into the shade. There was something there . . .

In an explosion of motion, a frightened deer burst from the trees and ran off along the fence. Startled, Jade squealed and fell backward. Her eyes, tearing up from the shock of the creature’s appearance, first watched it gallop away, then turned to the forest again. There was still something there. She couldn’t make out what it was, but it was big, and it was moving.

For the moment, her curiosity managed to drown out the voices of both reason and fear. Whatever the beast in the forest was, it was moving very quietly. Jade could make out its form, but no details. It just seemed like a mass of green moving deeper into the forest. She crept forward, but with each step she took toward it, the shape retreated faster, until finally it was out of sight. Jade squinted after it, but there was no question, it was gone. She looked around her. Here and there branches and bushes seemed snapped away. Then she looked down. There, on the parched forest floor, was a footprint. It was huge, and looked almost like the sort a rooster might leave behind if it were the size of an elephant. Just as the wheels in her young mind began to turn, and fear began to trickle back into place, a gruff voice rang out.

“Girl! Where have you run off to?” called Drudder.

Jade hurried back to the light of the field and spent the rest of the day trying not to think about what she had seen. As is so often the case, those things we wish to forget have a terrible habit of consuming our minds. She tried to work the land. She tried to eat her meal. Every moment, her young mind was churning on the images she’d seen. The conclusion was obvious, but too terrifying to consider. Finally, just as the empty plates were being cleared away, the words that she’d tried so dutifully to keep from her mind found their way to her mouth.

“I saw a dragon,” she said quietly.

The silence came slowly. Curious eyes turned in her direction; her adoptive family reacted roughly as they would have if a piece of furniture had made the comment.

“Did you say a dragon?” asked one of the boys.

“You didn’t see a dragon,” said Drudder.

“I did, it was in the forest next to--”

“You didn’t see a dragon!” he repeated firmly.

“Dragons live in the mountains; we’re in the plains,” said the youngest brother.

“Everybody would have seen it if there was a dragon here,” said the middle boy.

“Everybody would be dead if there was a dragon here,” said the eldest.

“Don’t make up stories,” Drudder advised.

“But I--”

“Don’t,” he repeated firmly.

Jade sheepishly closed her mouth and lowered her eyes. From that day onward, she did not say a word to anyone about what she had seen, but the edge of the fields nearest to the forest went suspiciously unweeded.

The days without rain continued to tick by, and one by one the wells began to run dry. The only water that remained came in the trickle of a stream that grew weaker by the day. Despair was steadily turning to desperation as the people fought for every drop of water to keep first their crops, then themselves, from withering away. When finally even the stream was little more than a dry bed, a meeting was once again called of the town leaders.

“It ain’t natural. It just ain’t natural,” raved Drudder.

“I’ll agree with you there, Drudder,” said Delnick, “but knowing it ain’t natural doesn’t do us much good, does it?”

“Well, what could cause a drought this bad?”

“Any number of things. There could be a witch or a wizard. The Gods could be mad at us. Some sort of mystic beast could be bringing it down on us. We could be cursed . . .” Delnick considered.

“Hold it . . . hold it . . . Could a dragon do this?” Drudder asked, the little girl’s words echoing in his mind.

“Yeah . . . Yeah, a dragon could. Course a dragon could. Dragons can do damn near anything,” replied Delnick, in the distinctive tone of growing certainty shared by all supposed leaders when confronted with something they are unsure of. “But if there was a dragon about, someone would have seen it.”

“The Rinton girl saw one, weeks back. I figured she was just imagining things.”

“Well, we’ve gotta be sure. You boys head home and arm yourselves. We need to find out if there is a dragon around here,” Delnick quickly ordered. There were already plenty of people whispering doubts of the old man’s ability to lead. Now that there was a direction, best to start moving immediately. “If there is, at least we know why we’re in such a bad state. Go, now!”

Hesitantly, the most able men the town had to offer set about the task. Starting with the forest where Jade had first seen the beast, they searched. Slowly but surely, the clues began to arise. Here and there, a half-hidden footprint that no beast in the area should have been able to leave would be found. Then came the partially buried remains of a charred stag. Finally, some distance out of town, a shallow cave leading into the sandy ground bore a smell unmistakable to Kruck, the one and only man in town who had encountered a dragon before. The men gathered again to discuss their findings. The fact that Kruck waved a hook in place of a hand while he spoke added significant weight to his words.

“You’re dealing with one of the fire-breathing devils, all right. Down in Teller’s Pit. It is a smart one, too, or someone is trying to cover for it. It tries to wipe up its tracks, and it tries to hide its kills. Gods willing we won’t ever
see
this thing, but I can tell you that it is damn sure here
,”
Kruck raved.

“And as long as that thing is here, this drought will continue . . .” Delnick surmised, “What will it take to kill it?”

“More than we got, that’s for sure,” Kruck replied, “You don’t want to fight the thing, anyway. That’ll just make it angry. We should all just be glad it hasn’t attacked
us
. . . yet.”

All eyes turned to Delnick. He stroked his chin.

“I want all of you to go back to your homes. I’ll think of something . . . and if any of you have an idea, you share it with me . . . Until then, we’ll just hope that whatever has kept that monster from killing us with fire instead of drying us out will keep doing it. Just try to pretend you aren’t living with a dragon breathing down your necks.”

With that less than sage plan, life in the town of Isintist continued, such as it was. Days passed with no solution, each of the townspeople nervously working in the shadow of the monster. Drudder leaned upon his hoe and peered over the half-tilled field. The land stretched all the way to the trees and, impossibly, it was fruitful. It was anything but a bountiful crop, but scattered patches of land had managed to produce wheat. He looked over the spotty green stretches, vaguely recalling that each had been worked by Jade . . . As a matter of fact, only those worked by Jade seemed to grow. He set the thought aside. It must have been the land. It was nothing like his own. Last year’s harvest, in a year that had seen plenty of rain, had barely been enough to survive on, let alone cover his gambling debt. That wasn’t a problem anymore, though. Once he’d secured this land, he’d been able to sell his own, save the patch that held his home. He shuddered at the thought of what would have happened to him had he not paid on time.

“Nice bit of dirt you’ve got here,” came a voice suddenly from behind him.

Startled, Drudder turned to find a tall, thin man with a smug grin on his unmistakably elfish face. In one hand was a piece of wood, in the other a knife. Intricate designs covered the wooden rod and, as he spoke, he casually traced out another symbol. Drudder knew the man all too well. He was the fellow in charge of placing the bets down at the races, the one who had kindly allowed him to gamble away more than a year’s earnings on credit. After a string of losses, he was also the man in charge of collecting. The sight of the knife made him cringe.

“What are you doing here? You . . . you got the money, right?” Drudder stammered.

“Oh, yes, yes, my friend. I am here on other business. By the way, I heard about that fire. Terrible tragedy. But, then, it served you fairly well, didn’t it?” remarked the visitor.

After a glance to see that no one else was in earshot, he smiled, “I’ll say. Now all of this land is mine.”

“Well . . . Not quite yours. Technically, it still belongs to the girl.”

“Yeah, but the girl belongs to me.”

“For now.”

“What do you mean ‘for now’? You told me that there wasn’t any other family to worry about.”

“Oh, there isn’t, there isn’t. But little girls grow up, and when she does, the land is hers.”

“ . . .I could . . . marry her to one of my sons.”

“You could, you could.” He nodded, carving another well-placed notch. “But then the land would be his, not yours.”

“ . . .So . . .” the man said slowly, brow furrowed in the unfamiliar activity of deep thought.

“Well, back before the unfortunate fire, you had realized, quite on your own, that if the owners of this land were to die, you would be able to claim it as your own, yes?”

“ . . .Yes . . .” Drudder said slowly.

He remembered the conversation well. After a calm, frank explanation of the very severe consequences of not paying his debts, the strange man had remarked that he knew a fellow with family in this village. He’d just passed away and, thus, in the unlikely event that the whole Rinton household were to die, their land would be up for grabs, and Drudder himself would have a very strong claim to it. The hypothetical scenario had been laid out with remarkable detail. True, he never did specifically suggest that Drudder
do
anything, but he did everything but put the lit torch in his hand.

“And the survival of the girl is the only deviation from that sequence of events, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then it would seem that you could bring about the initially intended outcome by correcting that minor flaw.”

“So . . .” he began, his mind slowly catching up to the logic, “you are saying I should kill the little girl, too.”

“I am saying nothing of the sort. It would be despicable to even suggest it,” he said, pausing to brush some shavings from the carving. “I am simply indicating that her death is the only way for this land to be irrevocably yours.”

“All right . . . all right, plenty of dangerous jobs around. She’s bound to have an accident.”

“Considering the fact she survived a fire that killed the rest of her family, I am not certain simple misfortune can be trusted to do the job. And if you were considering helping fate along, you should know that more than a few suspicious eyes are turned in your direction already.”

“ . . .Well, what else is there?”

“Why, selflessness, my boy. You must put your village before yourself.”

“I . . . I don’t know what you mean . . .”

“Well, it just so happens I came to deliver a message to the church. It seems a note was received up north informing Conner Celeste about the Rinton tragedy. Conner, you’ll recall, is the young man who I’d mentioned had died.”

“Yeah . . .”

“Well, you never did ask me how he met his end, did you?”

“No . . .”

“Poison. Perhaps a poisoned knife, perhaps a poisoned claw or tooth. And not only that, but a dragon was seen near his body. Funny thing about dragons. They tend to carry a vendetta--”

“A what?”

“A grudge,” he simplified with a roll of his eyes, “against whole families--”

“Can . . . dragons poison people?” Drudder asked, quickly falling behind in the conversation again.

“A venomous dragon is a rare but not unheard of occurrence. Please try to focus, I’m coming to a point. You see, if the dragon killed Connor, and it is seeking to exact some sort of vengeance on the whole of his family, then it would have come after the Rintons. It may have even started that fire,” he led.

“No, but I--yeah, the
dragon
started that fire. Say, how did you know we had a dragon problem?”

“Word travels fast. Now, if the beast wants to punish the entire family, then it won’t leave until it has the girl, yes?”

Drudder nodded slowly, struggling to connect the pieces, “So . . . You are saying I should--”

“No, Mr. Drudder. No. I am not saying you should do anything. I am merely musing out loud that were to you to offer the girl as a sacrifice to the dragon, it might appease the beast, simultaneously ending the drought, clearing you of any suspicion, securing the land for you once and for all, and making you a local hero. Any decision to do this contemptible thing would be yours alone!” the strange man growled.

“Okay, then . . .”

“Well, I’m off to deliver this message to the church. And good luck with your dragon problem.”

Chapter II

W
ITH
THAT
THE
STRANGE
MAN
paced away, while Drudder hurried to the home of Delnick. That night, another meeting was called. By the time the relevant parties were gathered, Drudder was almost giddy with excitement. He had lit the fire that killed the Rintons, and the fact had haunted him from that day.