Meghan's Dragon (19 page)

Chapter 56

“I don’t get it,” Bryan complained to Meghan as they pitched their tent. “I know that those guys were no match for all of the veterans working for Rowan, and I saw Theodric and his men grab longbows and head into the woods when the wagons halted. But why did that soldier knock his own leader off a horse with a pole-axe? If the officer wasn’t dead when he hit the ground, I’ll bet those troopers put him out of his misery when they caught up with the horse.”

“I guess it was that or they all would have died,” Meghan replied quietly. “Did men always follow stupid orders and run to their deaths in those games you keep talking about?”

“Sort of,” Bryan admitted. “They’d usually climb over the bodies of their comrades to keep attacking until you killed the last one for bonus points. But still, if word gets back to the king, the next time there’ll be an army waiting for us.”

“I don’t know who enchanted Rowan’s sword, but I’ve read about oath magic and that ex-seeker will never talk. The man who swears the oath will use his own magic to enforce the promise as long as he lives. The troopers won’t go back to their baron or duke again because they’re mutineers. They weren’t part of the royal guard or things would have gone differently. Phinneas told me that the household troops only travel with the king.”

“But there must be records. I don’t know, work permits and travel papers, things like that. People can’t just go wherever they want without somebody knowing.”

“Have you seen any of the things you’re talking about since you arrived here?” Meghan asked. “People are identified by their looks, their accents, who they say they are, and the companions who vouch for them. As long as those men don’t return to their castle barracks, nobody will be looking for them.”

“So soldiers only fight when they want to?”

“What gave you that idea?” Meghan held the tent pole straight and waited for Bryan to pull the ridge rope taut before continuing. “Soldiers fight for pay, and many of them die for pay, but there are certain things they have a right to expect. They sign up to fight against other soldiers with war mages in support. There must be battlefield healers and some chance of winning. Didn’t you say that the seeker spoke of unknown magic on our side? Why would a small group of soldiers attack a larger group of armed men who they obviously recognized as seasoned fighters, not to mention the likelihood that a hidden mage could burn them to a crisp before the bowmen turned them into pincushions? On top of all that, the traveling player troupes are well known to soldiers. Bethany tells me that they make up half of the audience for some of the martial plays, and even if they’ve taken the king’s silver, they’re men, not slaves.”

“It’s different where I came from,” Bryan told her. “We have volunteer armies, or at least, most of them are, and the men and women join because they care about their kingdoms. Damn, I didn’t mean kingdoms. If we ever see Hadrixia again, I’m going to ask for a refund on her translation magic. Our lands are ruled by the people. We vote for our kings.”

“You have women in your armies?” Meghan asked in astonishment, ignoring the young man’s nonsensical claims about government.

“Women these days do all sorts of stuff that used to be reserved for men. We even have women kings.”

“They’re called ‘queens’ here.”

“I know that. I just meant women on Dark Earth have more options in most of the kingdoms.”

“Like wearing see-through hose,” Meghan reminded him.

“That’s just—I really don’t get women,” Bryan cut himself off.

“Poor Bryan. If you work hard studying magic, maybe I’ll give you lessons.”

“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” he growled at her. He remembered girls who liked to flirt, but it had never led anywhere, at least not for him. “What’s the next castle on the festival circuit?”

“The Blue Duke’s.”

“Makers of brew, for men who are blue, heat the wart true, check in the flue,” he quoted from memory. “I’ve heard of burning warts off with a red-hot nail, but it doesn’t sound very magical. Does it mean that guys with warts get depressed so they drink a lot of beer before burning them off?”

“
Wort
, not
wart
,” Meghan corrected him with a giggle.

Bryan looked at her blankly.

“Wort is the liquid the brewers get from mash to make beer,” she explained. “I know you had beer on Dark Earth.”

“Wait a minute, I don’t understand something. Those verses were written in English, but we’re talking your language and the rhymes still work. How can word pairs that sound the same but mean different things be paralleled in your language?”

“Hadrixia told me that people who learn a new language through magic usually forget the old one,” Meghan informed him apologetically. “I didn’t think it mattered since you can’t go back, but it is funny you can still read it. Wait, have you tried writing?”

Bryan picked up a stick and scratched a few letters in the dirt. “Cat,” he pronounced triumphantly.

“But that’s our word,” Meghan reminded him. “Try pronouncing just each letter alone.”

He complied with her request by sounding out each letter by itself, and the girl nodded her head knowingly.

“You’re just using the letters you know how to pronounce to spell words in our language,” she explained. “I’ll bet that the rhymes on the map aren’t written in your language at all. Somebody just used your alphabet to write our language phonetically. It means you only have to teach me how to pronounce twenty-three letters, and then I’ll be able to read any of these messages. It will be like a secret code between us.”

“Twenty-six letters,” Bryan asserted. “Our alphabet is better than yours.”

“Grow up.”

Chapter 57

“Are you two planning on visiting the Blue Duke’s castle?” Laitz asked his assistants. They were engaged in setting up the illusion booth on the main drag of the festival associated with the middle dukedom, and the question took both Meghan and Bryan by surprise.

“Why do you ask?” Meghan replied cautiously.

“You know that rumors travel faster than draft horses, and it seems that the castles on the festival route have been visited by strange manifestations.”

“Like what?” Bryan demanded pointblank.

“Well, there was an odd incident at the Red Duke’s castle where the tower watch claimed they were attacked by a fire mage’s ghost which they slew with arrows. When the other guards entered the tower, they found nothing but some broken arrows on the floor, but there was fire damage to the wooden stairs and platform.”

“The tower watch must have been drunk,” Meghan suggested.

“At first the guard commander thought that as well,” Laitz confirmed. “Then the duke’s wife came forward and said she was out on her balcony before the incident took place and heard the tower watch call out a challenge. When she looked at the base of the tower, she saw two figures slipping through the door, a tall man and a small companion, perhaps a woman. She continued watching as the alarm bell started ringing and somebody pushed the door closed from the inside. Then the castle guard swarmed the place, and she assumed the intruders had been caught. It wasn’t until she woke late in the morning and heard the story that she thought to tell anybody.”

“Maybe she was drunk, too,” Bryan said. “You know what those people are like.”

“Yes, I actually do. But her testimony was enough for the guard commander to stop interrogating the tower watch and bring in a seeker, who confirmed the account given by the men. I’m told the Red Duke’s mage is going crazy trying to uncover a secret passage.”

“Bryan and I were thinking it might be interesting if we could add riders to the dragons,” Meghan announced. “I haven’t quite mastered it yet, but he can manage a rider and even have him throw a spear.”

“Then there’s the story of the ceiling art in the Green Duke’s shield room,” Laitz continued, ignoring the girl’s attempt to change the subject. “It’s not his real shield room, of course, just part of a tourist trap they set up to bring in some cash, but the painting—did I say painting? It was a fresco done by a traveling artist from Old Land back when that section of the castle was originally built. In any case, it was famous in some circles for its depiction of the angry storm goddess hurling a thunderbolt at some mythical creature who was bothering her daughter.”

“Is there a point to this story?” Bryan asked rudely.

“It seems that the painting was the high point of the tour, with the guide providing magical illumination just before the visitors moved on to the gift shop. Imagine when she lit up the ceiling and the goddess was smiling, watching her daughter dance with a young man.”

“I thought you put it back the way it was,” Bryan said, missing Meghan’s frantic cues to keep his mouth closed. “Oh, Laitz obviously knows it was us or he wouldn’t have gone through the whole performance.”

“He knows it was us now that you’ve confirmed it,” the girl retorted before turning to their mentor. “We’re sort of on a treasure hunt,” she told him. “An old family obligation of sorts.”

“I guessed it was something like that,” Laitz replied. “Your affairs are your own. We’re all up to something or another around here, but I wanted to warn you. Some of the dukes may be stupid, it happens when leaders are chosen by order of birth, but their advisers and their mages include some of the best minds in the land. If you see the need to extend your sightseeing to the Blue Duke’s castle, I would save it for our last night in the area. And be prepared for a higher level of awareness on the part of the guards.”

“Thank you,” Meghan said. “And I was serious about showing riders on the dragons.”

“I’m sure you were. I’ve been working on that myself, so we’ll give it a try as soon as you’re ready. Then we really will have the finest illusions on two continents.”

“That Red Duke’s museum was just a tourist trap anyway,” Bryan said. “Serves them right that their ceiling art got screwed up.”

“I’m afraid it didn’t play out the way you imagine,” Laitz told the young man. “Everybody is calling it a miracle. They’ve raised the price of admission, and local people who never would have given the displays the time of day are lined up around the moat waiting to get in.”

Chapter 58

“Why do I have to play the evil baron?” Bryan complained. “I do lighting and the dragon illusion, plus I let Rowan beat on me with his sword every day.”

“It’s just three lines,” Meghan chided him. “Do you know how many lines I had to memorize to play Elstan?”

“But the baron is really a jerk. At the beginning of the first act, I order the death of my loyal war mage. At the end of the first act, I order the death of his son, and in the middle of the second act, I send a soldier to kill the mage’s dog. I’m on stage for less than a minute, and all I do is give stupid orders.”

“Bethany told me you have a good death scene at the end.”

“I don’t even have a line then. I’m sitting back in a chair getting a shave, and the barber cuts my throat!” Bryan paused and broke into a smile. “It is kind of cool, though. Simon showed me how to work the jugular kit they use. The barber slices the tip off the nozzle glued to my neck while I’m squeezing the bladder, and the blood will shoot halfway across the stage.”

Meghan shook her head in mock disgust. Then she retrieved her slate with the painstakingly transcribed alphabet letters from the oilskin map, along with the phonetic equivalents in mage’s script. Getting Bryan to repeat himself just two or three times so she could memorize a new letter was a task in itself, but the thought of spurting blood had him in a good mood.

“So when the ‘c’ and the ‘h’ are next to each other, you say them as ‘ch’ instead of ‘kuh-huh.’”

“Check in the flue,” he reiterated.

“And the ‘u’ followed by ‘e’ turns into ‘ooh.’”

“You’ve got it,” he replied, already bored with playing teacher. “I’ll bet you read better than I do now. When do I try on the dragon gown?”

“You’re willing?” Meghan asked in surprise. “I thought you weren’t in any hurry to become a dragon.”

“It beats reading. Besides, I guess this business about the king having a warrant out for you is serious, so we’d better do everything we can to prepare. Up until now, all of the sword training and stage fighting didn’t feel that different from the games I used to play. Watching and hearing a guy get pole-axed off his horse changes things. It’s just lucky that we ended up with Rowan rather than being on our own.”

“That’s what I tried to say earlier,” the girl replied. “Do you think it was really luck?”

“Sure. Phinneas happened to come across the players on his way back from that last battle, and he knew Simon.”

“You know I’ve been spending time with Simon’s wife, teaching her some of the healing techniques I learned from Hadrixia. It turns out that Faye and the other folk healers always share what they know, but the methods I learned are on a completely different level. Faye thinks it’s all Old Land training.”

“What’s wrong with Old Land? Even Laitz has been there.”

“Traveling across the sea is a rare thing. And so are the magical knots that Hadrixia taught me. What I’m saying is that just like Rowan and his veterans are too good to be players, Hadrixia and Phinneas were too good to be living in a minor baron’s castle on the frontier.”

“So you think they tricked us?”

“What? No, that’s not what I mean,” Meghan sputtered. “Why are you so suspicious? I was thinking it’s odd that two powerful people lived in the backwater castle where I grew up, and they both befriended me.”

“Sounds like somebody is suffering from princess syndrome.”