Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) (21 page)

They hurl themselves onto me, one after another, dangling from my arms and shoulders, holding my waist and legs. Their teeth scrape loudly against my armor, like tiny saws working at tree trunks. They push at me from three sides. We sway dangerously, back and forth. I pry my arm free and raise the dagger over my head. Aim at the nape of a woman wearing a wimple. I have no strength to put behind the blow; I simply let my hand fall. The blade sinks two inches into her neck. She shrieks and throws her head back, which yanks the dagger out of my hand and sends it into the darkness.

I must find the cure.

I raise my gauntlet and drop it on her face. The lobstered plates rattle against her forehead. A man lunges at my neck, his teeth scraping at my bevor. I gather all my strength and strike the woman’s face again. Her bones crunch and grind beneath the metal plates of my gauntlet. She screams, her voice nasal behind a shattered nose and cheek.

I must cure Elizabeth.

I put one hand behind her neck. The man pushes at my helmet. I can feel the strap straining against my chin. I draw back once more and use the strength of blooming hysteria to drive my gauntlet through the woman’s head. Her face becomes soft and curved. I smell something briny and rich, feel the back of her skull against my fingers.

I will never leave her side again.

Tears come to my eyes as I let the woman drop and turn to the man pulling at my helmet. I grab his face in my hands, feeling a dozen other hands pulling at my armor. Plates rise, straps strain. The man opens his mouth and I slam my great helm into him, shattering his teeth.

Je suis apprivoisé.
I am tame.

The tears flow freely, my screams of rage muffled and echoing in the helmet. I cannot stop screaming. I draw back my head and deliver another blow, then another and another. My throat hurts. I slam my helmet into the man’s forehead again and again. I do not stop even when the man’s hands fall limply to his sides. My helm slips against the wet mess of his skull but I do not stop.

I’m sorry, Elizabeth.
Mea maxima culpa.

There is not enough of the man’s head left to strike, so I look for the next plaguer. I spin in a half circle and see one wearing armor. I grab his shoulders and realize that it is Tristan and that he has been shouting at me. I do not know for how long. He places both hands on my helm and looks into my eyes. His mouth moves; he is saying something, but I cannot hear it. All I hear is my breathing and the echoes of my gauntlets striking the woman’s face. Caving in her skull. The Stour is like a thunderous waterfall in my great helm. Each breath I take is like the roar of a bear. I cannot focus. My knees tremble.

“Gone!” Tristan shouts. “All of them! They are gone! Speak to me, Ed!
Speak to me
!”

I blink my eyes and stoop, then collapse to the ground. My wrist hurts. Why does my wrist hurt? I hurt it. The doctor…the nun…

I claw at my helmet. I cannot breathe.

Tristan kneels beside me and helps me with the straps. I throw the great helm off and take deep gasps of air. Steam rises from beneath my bevor. I pull off my gauntlets and look at my wrist. It is red and swollen and I feel the familiar fire in my arm.

Plaguer bodies form two half-moon ramparts around us. They lie in twisted, bloody, mangled stacks. Some of them writhe. I estimate fifteen or twenty bodies. Not enough.

“What…what happened to the rest?” I say.

Tristan takes his gauntlets off and scoops water from the Stour in his cupped hands. He pours it over my head. “I don’t know. They just left.”

“What do you mean they left?” It is lighter by the river. The setting sun is burning its way through the clouds, turning the skies into a blazing forge. “Plaguers…don’t just leave.”

Tristan looks up the Stour, then down it, then collapses to his knees by the river, his breathing labored. “I’m…very wary of it. I felt a chill when they left, but I’m glad they did.” He scoops more water from the river. “I don’t think we would have made it. Maybe the—”

The Stour explodes in a roaring eruption of white water, foam, and the most terrifying jaws I have ever seen. Craggy, sculpted jaws lined with jagged white teeth the shape of thorns and as long as my forefinger. The creature’s head is nothing but mouth, and it is a mouth like nothing on earth. It is Lucifer’s man-trap. A cave with knife-blade teeth. Plateaus of gnarled rock splitting and swallowing the world. It is the very gateway to hell.

And it shuts on Tristan with the sound of a cell door slamming forever closed.

Chapter 29

The dragon’s jaws clamp shut around Tristan’s waist and the beast tosses its head to one side, scaled muscles rippling, whipping him effortlessly off the riverbank and into the Stour. Knight and beast vanish underwater. It happens so quickly that a moment after the attack it seems like Tristan was never there.

“
Tristan
!” The mist roils and water churns but I cannot see them. There is nothingness again, an oblivion that has swallowed them both. “
Tristan
!”

I scramble to my feet and crouch, ready to leap into the river after him, but I hesitate. I cannot help Tristan if I am trapped at the river bottom. The weight of my armor will sink me, and we will both drown. If we are not eaten first. But what choice do I have? Tristan dies while I debate. I lean toward the river, bend my knees and—

A gauntleted hand rises among the mist. It waves violently, slaps the surface. I reach toward it. “Tristan!
Tristan
!” My fingers brush against his fingers. I grab the thin tendril of an oak branch and lean forward, my entire torso now over the water. My fingertip touches his gauntlet. My fingers close on his fingers. And then he is torn from me.

The hand travels upstream swiftly, appearing and disappearing in the mist for ten or fifteen feet. It becomes an arm, then shoulders and a great helm. Tristan sucks in a deep, wheezing breath. He screams my name, his voice cracking and high pitched. The mist parts and closes behind him as the dragon propels him through the water. He strikes at the dragon with his fist. The monster rolls. Tristan flips sideways and vanishes into the Stour once more.

I run along the bank, pushing through branches and shrubs and unbuckling my sword belt. I glimpse the white belly of the dragon as it rolls and then the mist hides even that from view. But they are less than ten feet from the bank.

I wrap the leather belt tightly in both hands, feel the bite of the cold metal buckle. Then I leap into the Stour.

In these times of madness, only madness will save us.

I spread my body to its full length as I leap. I stretch my arms out forward, the belt forming a two-foot link between my hands. It seems like I hang in the air forever, suspended over coiling white clouds. The water will never come. I am in purgatory again. I am a hairy tick and I dangle over the hairy sea.

When I finally hit the water, I find it surprisingly warm. It surges over me. Floods in through every crevice of my armor. I can see nothing but frothing river. My arms hook around an object that I pray is Tristan. One of my hands touches rough warts and scales. My chest falls on something that does not like being fallen upon. It thrashes and whips its body. Tosses me like a hound’s toy. But I am hooked to Tristan.

The water froths. I think it has released Tristan, because he and I drift downward. The monstrously spiked tail sweeps past my eyes. Dirt and debris cloud the water. And then I see something gleaming and white. The jaws of the beast. Breath leaves me in a thousand bubbles. The dragon flashes past and I get a closer look at its lunatic grin. Meet the gaze of one jutting, serpent-slit eye. The tail thumps me and sends me reeling in the water as the wyrm sweeps past.

Tristan and I sink. My lungs feel like lead. My head throbs. My boot touches soft mud and sinks to my shin. I shove toward the shore, drag Tristan with me. My other boot sinks into the mud a few feet closer to the riverbank. I feel like sleeping. The lap of the river is soothing. The milfoil caresses my cheek. Sleep. My arms relax. Darkness eats at the edges of my vision. I struggle against it, bubbles rising from my lips. But the last breath escapes my mouth and I ascend to heaven.

I open my eyes and cough. If I am in heaven, then I am terribly disappointed. I cough again, on my hands and knees, water leaving my mouth like vomit. Heaven is a leafy riverbank in a dark forest and apparently it is full of coughing men. I cough and look sideways. Tristan is on his hands and knees, and he too coughs water. It trickles from the breathing holes of his helm. I recall, somewhere in the shadowy depths of my mind, him pulling me from the river. He throws off his helmet, vomits more water, then sits up on his knees, and tosses me my sword belt. His eyes scan the river carefully.

“I propose a new rule,” he says. “If plaguers run away, then we should too.”

I cough. Did the plaguers really run from the dragon? I have never seen plaguers run from anything. “Are you injured?”

“Yes,” he says. “That monster tore off a large chunk of my pride.”

“A mortal wound for you,” I reply.

 “No. I’m not injured.” He runs his hands over his face. “Why, exactly…are we hunting this thing again?”

I shrug. “The only dragon slayers of our time. Something of that nature.”

“We’ve done quite a bit in our time,” he says. “We’re quite selfish really. Young knights need accomplishments, too.”

“And old knights need to find a cure for the plague.”

“Yes, yes, but did you see its teeth, Edward? Those claws?” He shakes his head, then smirks at me. “Besides, alchemy is a sin.”

There is less than an hour of sunlight left, but I resolve not to leave until we have slain the dragon. I recover my sword from where I left it in the ground. The plaguer I pinned to the forest floor with it grasps and hisses, tries to stand. I jam the blade into the back of his skull and he stops moving.

We scour the shore, using leaf-strewn branches to sweep at the fading mist. I feel lightheaded and my wrist throbs with pain. Perhaps that idiot doctor was right. Maybe the stars are not in my favor. I have fought nearly everything there is to fight in Europe and have never been defeated. But a one-inch gash on my flesh threatens to put me in the ground.

“Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow,” Tristan says. “They will throw Sara into the river again. The beast will wander to the village to be pampered and fed. Then we can leap out from the forest and give it a little of
God’s Love
. See how
it
enjoys being ambushed.”

I continue walking, waving my branch at the river and holding my sword out toward the water. Tristan lost his sword in the Stour. I think that is the third sword he has lost on our travels.

“We don’t know if the dragon will come for Sara,” I say. “And if it does, it might not come for hours.”

“Of course it will come for her, Edward. No monster can resist a free meal.” He frowns. “I can’t resist a free meal either. Does that make me a monster?”

“No,” I reply. “The things you do and say make you a monster.”

The mist is not so thick now. I spot something in the water. Eyes staring from beneath the river? I reach forward and shake the branch at it. The leaves chatter but the object in the water does not move. I pick up a flint and throw it. The stone glugs
and sends
a tiny crest of water into the air directly in front of the eyes. But it is no dragon. Just a submerged branch.

“Ed, let’s go back to the village and get a fair night’s rest so we will be ready for the dragon tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if we spend the next two hours walking up and down this river. We won’t see it—it’s too dark. The dragon is going to find us first again. Remember how we fared the last time that happened?”

“It won’t find us first,” I say.

“How can you be so sure of that?”

I point to a row of white teeth that seem to glow in the dark, thirty paces farther up the riverbank. The branches of a shaggy chestnut dip down to the ground by the Stour and the dragon has pulled its upper body onto them.

 “We found it first.” Tristan sounds surprised.

I study the creature. It is the first time I have seen it at rest. Its back is studded with rows of squat, stony spikes, like sharpened warts. The size of the monster’s head staggers me. It is nearly as long as my arm, the jaws so wide that I could place my breastplate inside them without touching the creature’s flesh. The eyes sit atop the head like burled knots in petrified bark. Its legs, flopped on either side of the thick body, look ridiculously small: bent things, armored in scales, and clawed. I wonder how they can support the weight of the mighty creature they are attached to.

“How do we get to it,” Tristan says, “without it either slipping into the river or burning us to cinders?”

“I’m not convinced that it breathes fire,” I say.

“It burned down Wormingford.”

“And who told you that, Tristan?” I ask.

“Father Ralf,” he replies. He sees my look and shrugs. “The man who sacrifices women to keep himself safe.”

“So tell me, how would Father Ralf know it burned Wormingford?” I ask. “And if the dragon could breathe fire, don’t you think the priest would have seen it by now? He would have mentioned that when Belisencia asked him if the monster breathed fire.”

“Very strong points,” Tristan says. “But the dragon can refute all of them with one breath.”

“Then why didn’t it?” I ask. “It had us both sitting on the riverbank within a foot of each other. It could have roasted us together. But it didn’t.”

Tristan shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t that hungry. You know how quickly roasts go bad. And it doesn’t look like it has much patience for salting and drying.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t be careful. But I think if it were going to burn us, it would have done so earlier.”

“Very well, Sir George,” Tristan says. “So how do we slay it?”

“The same way it tried to slay us.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” Tristan says. “But I’m not going to be the one that bites it.”