The Dragon of Despair (26 page)

Idly, Elise wondered how matters of property and precedence were handled in New Kelvin and resolved to ask Grateful Peace. It might help her understand this strange land into which Melina had now inserted herself so successfully.

The thaumaturge—or Illuminator, as Peace preferred to be termed now that he was in exile—had taken up residence in the gatehouse a few days after Elise’s own arrival. He looked more frail than she recalled, doubtless in part because of the physical struggles related to his healing from the amputation of his arm, but more—at least so Elise thought on later consideration—because he had been robbed of the trappings of office and position that had been such a part of him.

The ornate silk robes and curly-toed slippers were gone, replaced by shirt, waistcoat, knee-breeches, and buckled shoes after the fashion of a Hawk Haven gentleman. His facial tattoos remained, but seemed disfigurement rather than adornment in a land where they marked him a stranger. In New Kelvin even the youngest child would have known at a glance the things Peace considered important about himself: his place as a member of the Sodality of Illuminators, his personal vow not to remarry, his promotion to a counselor to the Dragon Speaker.

In Hawk Haven all that anyone saw were stylized patterns that rather than clarifying who Grateful Peace was seemed to set him apart. The untrained eye flitted between the tattoos and the face beneath, uncertain which to focus upon and, inevitably, coming up with a confused image that muddled both into one useless mess.

Peace’s myopia didn’t help matters, the spectacles through which he surveyed everyone and everything providing yet another means of distancing himself from his surroundings. All in all, he was not an easy man to like, yet Elise did like him at least a little—a liking that was two-quarters pity, one-quarter admiration, and one-quarter curiosity.

Citrine had not warmed to Grateful Peace as she had to Edlin, but that would have been rather much for which to hope. At least she had not started screaming or having nightmares after their initial introduction. That was a start.

Elise began Citrine’s initiation into New Kelvinese language and custom with costumes and makeup. Elise had yet to meet a child who didn’t like playing dress-up and Citrine was no exception. This could provide a bridge to more complicated things.

Elise also realized she needed to polish her own command of the language. Last winter she had developed a good enough accent to be able to pass almost as a native—all other things considered. She wanted to achieve that again and to add to it the myriad details of body language and mannerism that would further help.

“I don’t see why, what?” Edlin said, when Elise pressed him to practice his own New Kelvinese.

The young lord’s tones were somewhat more peevish than usual. Grateful Peace had suggested that Edlin grow his hair longer since almost no one wore it short in New Kelvin and Edlin complained about how heavy his hair felt. Spring had become summer when no one was looking. The days were longer and the nights hotter. Even here in the northern reaches of Hawk Haven there were ripe fruit and fresh salads on the table. The cook Duchess Kestrel had loaned them made a fruit tart Elise was ready to die for.

Elise knew these culinary flourishes interested Edlin less than the fact that two litters of puppies were toddling around. There were also some promising foals—fruits of Derian’s initial purchases for the stables—to be checked over lest the grooms be less than perfect in their training.

Especially when the days were hot, Elise felt something of the same desire to avoid study. It would be much nicer to sip cool drinks on the terrace over at the Kestrel manse and gossip about fashion with Lady Luella and her attendants. She knew her relatively fresh arrival from the capital would make her quite popular in such discussions. However, duty called—duty assigned by the king himself—so Elise was a bit strict with Edlin when he whined.

“I mean, we can’t hope to pass over there, can we?”

Elise frowned.

“We may need to, cousin. In any case, even if we do not disguise ourselves, learning New Kelvinese language gives us an amazing advantage in any circumstance. The New Kelvinese are not accustomed to foreigners who can understand their language. They tend to speak about us to our faces, trusting in the language barrier to hide their meaning.”

Edlin saw humor in this and grinned.

“But we would understand them, what? I say, what fun! And maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be able to speak the stuff anyhow. I mean, what if we need directions or something?”

Elise didn’t comment further, pleased enough that Edlin was willing to add to the couple dozen memorized words and phrases he’d acquired the winter before.

She turned her attention to Wendee Jay. Full-figured, with rich dark blond hair that Elise secretly envied, Wendee was a fascinating person—especially to Elise, who had made few friends outside of Hawk Haven’s nobility and “better” families until the previous year.

A former actress, Wendee was now a full-time retainer with Duchess Kestrel, a patronage she had accepted because of the security it offered her immediate family—two daughters and her mother, who cared for the girls when Wendee needed to travel on the duchess’s business.

Wendee was something Elise had never before met—a divorced woman who didn’t even pretend she had anything to be ashamed about. Indeed, her opinion was she would have been far more worthy of censure if she had stayed in her destructive marriage.

Duchess Kestrel had been far too clever to restrict this free-spirited woman to boring routine and when Firekeeper had come to winter in the North Woods, the duchess had offered Wendee the challenge of serving as the wolf-woman’s personal attendant. Wendee had courage and enthusiasm enough for three—just the things needed by a personal attendant who was going to face the duty of forcing Firekeeper into her despised formal attire.

Wendee Jay provided no problem when it came to learning the New Kelvinese language. She already possessed a fairly large vocabulary, acquired when performing New Kelvinese dramas, for which there was an enthusiastic audience in northern Hawk Haven. Mostly the plays were performed in translation, but the translators always left in a seasoning of the New Kelvinese language. From that basis, Wendee had gone on to build her command of the language, both through study and on occasional trips into New Kelvin.

The problem was that Wendee needed to unlearn much of what she knew. The dramas, in some cases hundreds of years old and dating to the days when the Old Country still ruled, were filled with archaic terminology and idioms. These, mingled with the market argot Wendee had rapidly acquired during their last stay in New Kelvin, led to some unforgettable combinations that left Grateful Peace—though long trained to impassivity—with a smile twitching his thin lips.

However, Wendee was ahead of Elise when it came to adapting her body language and intuitively grasping the reasons for certain gestures or mannerisms. In matters of custom, New Kelvin was so traditional as to be nearly stagnant. The working classes reserved these formal manners for holidays, but the ruling classes at all times mimicked behaviors passed down for generations.

“I shall admit,” Peace said once, “that those very plays Goody Wendee has committed to memory are—in their unadulterated form—sources for protocol. They are deferred to when such matters are not covered in the traditional works on manners.”

Wendee nodded. “I thought so. There was a part in one of the more modern works—
Butterfly Meets the Glass Trader
—that seemed to hint at just that.”

Peace nodded agreement, but Elise thought it was unlikely that he was familiar with modern New Kelvinese drama. Surely the ruling class—in which he had been preeminent—reserved their interest for the antique plays.

Later Elise would find that she was both right and wrong in this assumption. The ruling class did tend to favor the older works, but Grateful Peace had been a very special person in that elite group. As the Dragon’s Eye—one of the exalted group of advisors known as the Dragon’s Three—Peace had been responsible for watching anything and everything that might affect the stability of the government he served.

Since the Dragon Speaker could be voted down by the Primes, the Dragon’s Eye was alert to those things that revealed the mood of the country and its people. Dramas, with their ability to sway hearts even more than minds, were key and Peace had been very much and very secretly a patron of the theater.

So the days passed, full and busy. Even when amply distracted, Elise found herself hoping for news of Firekeeper and Derian—though it was still too early, even by King Tedric’s odd estimate. And she watched for someone else, too.

Jared Surcliffe had not arrived, though the duchess had expected him to reach the Norwood estate at around the same time as had Elise’s party. Not even a note came and Elise found herself worried—unduly, she tried to tell herself. Nevertheless, she had to restrain herself from running to the window every time hooves sounded in the yard or from rooting through her letters looking for a certain hand and a certain seal.

Elise wondered what was keeping Doc away, worried that despite their seeming accord upon parting last winter maybe he was avoiding her.

FIREKEEPER, DERIAN
, and the mountain horses made the trip to Eagle’s Nest in what, if anyone had been measuring, would have been considered record time. However, Derian was far too worn out from riding dawn to dusk, from attending to the needs of his string—not to mention staying alert for signs that Firekeeper’s impatience was going to transform into abandonment—to notice just how many sunrises and sunsets had passed.

Firekeeper, never much of one for keeping time, only felt the pressure to get somewhere faster than she possibly could. This was a relatively new sensation and one she did not like at all. There were nights when, lying awake on the fringes of Derian’s latest encampment and invigorated by the coolness that came with the dark, she fought back the urge to get up and go just a bit farther.

When the wolf-woman slept, she dreamed of her impatience. She wondered how the situation was developing between the new Bardenville and her pack. She wondered if the wolves had already begun their campaign of unwelcome. She wondered if the humans realized there was intelligent malice behind the eating of their crops and trampling of their fields. She wondered if anyone had died.

She hoped that if anyone had died, that someone was human.

This last would have greatly shocked Derian, who, without knowing quite as much as Firekeeper did about the situation, entertained similar musings. While he sympathized with the Beasts, his was an abstract sympathy born mostly of his fondness for Firekeeper and her friends.

The human colonists, among whom he had lived and worked for all those days, were real to him. Derian hoped Firekeeper could work out something that would enable Ewen and his settlers to come to terms with the Beasts. He never really thought that the Beasts would win and drive the humans away.

After all, througout human history, humans had always won. Sometimes lots of humans died to attain the victory, but they always won. It was just the way things were.

Derian never thought about the logic behind this assumption, just as he never thought about just how limited was his grasp of human history. In destroying the books left by the Old Country rulers of the former colony of Gildcrest, Zorana the Great and her followers had destroyed a great deal more. Even for one like himself who had seen things that most would dismiss as myth, it was hard to abandon gut-level assumptions. The thing about gut-level assumptions is that you don’t think about them.

Firekeeper and Derian separated one evening, with Derian headed for a post-house a day’s ride outside the city. Derian had sent a message ahead by one of the king’s fast post-riders Blind Seer happened to get wind of—and stop.

Brock and old Toad should be at the post-house to meet Derian. Colby would also know about the mules ahead of time, a matter that Derian had mulled over, weighed, and considered, deciding it was better to give Colby time to think than to have to tell his father what he’d done to his face.

Derian had done many brave things in the last year or so—some of them even heroic—but he’d still rather climb a rope ladder into a pirates’ den than face the uncertainty of his father’s wrath at the loss of two good mules.

Disregarding the gathering darkness, Firekeeper cut north and east across the fields—doing her best to remember not to trample the young plants that were greening the cultivated plots. She rested occasionally, but didn’t bother with sleep, pressing on with the relentlessness of water spilling over a dam.

By midmorning, when Derian was jogging down the road with Brock and Toad, being reassured once again that Colby wasn’t going to have his ears over the mules—though it might be a good thing that Derian could count on Earl Kestrel’s patronage for the occasional suit of new clothes—Firekeeper was crossing the almost impassable ravine west of the castle, hauling Blind Seer up after her, the wolf complaining about the uncomfortable rope harness, then trotting across the semi-wild hunting preserve.