The Dragon's Son (2 page)

Outside the door, a bird sang to its mate. A squirrel chattered and a fox
barked. The wind rustled the leaves. Creeping through the open door, a breath
brushed Ven softly on the cheek.

“What is your name?” Bellona asked him, beginning her catechism.

“Ven,” answered the boy. He didn’t like this part.

“Your true name,” Bellona said, frowning.

“Vengeance,” he replied reluctantly.

“Vengeance,” she repeated.

Leaning near, she placed her lips upon his forehead in the ritual kiss that
she gave him once a year, her gift to him on his birthday. Her lips were rough,
like her hands, and the kiss was cool and dry and dispassionate, yet he would
feel it all the year long, feel the memory of it. This, too, he would hold
close to him.

“Let your soul rest easy, Melisande,” said Bellona. “Go back to sleep.”

She let her hands fall from him, took her eyes away from him. Her gaze
rested on the flowers and she was sad and far distant.

“You have the rabbit snares to check, Ven. And,” she added unexpectedly, “tomorrow
we’re traveling to the Fairfield faire. We have furs to barter.”

He froze the way the rabbits froze whenever he came near. He hated the
faire. Once a year, they went to either Fairfield or another town for Bellona
to barter fur pelts, exchanging them for salt and flour and tools and whatever
else they needed, which wasn’t much. At the faire were the children who looked
like Ven from the waist up, but were not like him from the waist down. And
though Bellona hid his beast’s legs beneath long woolen breeches and a long
woolen tunic and hid his clawed feet inside leather boots, she could not hide
the fact that he did not walk as did other children.

“I don’t want to go,” he said to her that morning, the morning of his
birthday. “I want to stay here. I’ll be all right on my own.”

He hoped for a moment she might let him, for there was a thoughtful look on
her face instead of the scowl of displeasure that he expected. At length,
however, she shook her head.

“No. You have to come. I need your help.”

That might be true, but that wasn’t the reason. She was making him go to
torture him, to test him. She was always testing him. Tests to make him strong.
He was angry at her and his anger blazed red in his mind and he said words he
was surprised to hear.

“Today is my birthday. You made me greet my mother. Why is it I never greet
my father?”

Bellona looked at him again—twice in one day—but this time he could not see
himself in her eyes. He saw fury.

She struck him with her open hand, struck him a blow that knocked him in a
heap to the dirt floor. He tasted blood in his mouth and the green smell of the
rushes.

Ven picked himself up. His ears rang and his head hurt. Blood dribbled from
his lip and he spit out a baby tooth that had been loose anyway. He did not
cry, for tears were a weakness. He looked at her and she looked at him. He
understood about his father then. Ven didn’t know how he understood, but he
did. He turned and ran out, his claws tearing the rushes.

He checked the rabbit snares, which were empty, and then came to this place,
his place, the cave, where he felt safe, secure. He thought about his mother,
who had given him his face—the face that pained Bellona to look upon because
she had loved Ven’s mother dearly and grieved her deeply and she blamed Ven for
her loss. And, not for the first time in his life, Ven thought about his
father.

The father, who had given him his legs—the legs of
a beast— and who was the reason for his name.

VEN SPENT THE DAY IN THE CAVE. BELLONA WOULD NOT miss him. He was free to do
what he liked during the day, so long as he completed his chores. The rule was
to be home by sunset. The one time he broke that rule, ventured too far away,
so that he was late coming back, Bellona whipped him with a willow branch, then
made him stand in the middle of the room all night. If he started to slump or
doze off, she flicked him with the branch.

The cave was not a large one, to Yen’s disappointment, for he often saw
visions in his mind of vast caverns with enormous chambers and labyrinthine
passages to be endlessly explored. Sometimes, at night, if Ven couldn’t sleep
or if the snarl of the wild cat or the snuffling and pawing of a bear around
their hut woke him, he would imagine he was curled up safely in the darkest,
deepest depths of his cave, so that no one in the world could ever, ever find
him. Not even his mother.

Yen’s cave had only one chamber and had apparently been used by a bear
taking its long sleep in the winter. Last fall, Ven had been certain that the
bear would return to claim it and he had prepared himself to defend it, for
under Bellona’s tutelage he was already a deft hand with a small bow.
Fortunately for him and for the bear, the animal had smelled his strange and
vaguely terrifying scent and sought another refuge, leaving Ven in sole
possession of the cave.

Screened by a heavy stand of trees and a jumble of rock, the cave was always
in shadow. Ven loved the darkness, for it was not dark to him. For him,
darkness was filled with vibrant colors, wild and clashing and dazzling, that
blazed across his mind. Alone, safe and protected by the darkness, he could
close his eyes and watch the colors, touch them, handle them, shape them, as
Bellona shaped the arrowheads or planed the arrow’s shaft.

He played with the colors on this day, his birthday. He tossed the colors
into the air and caught them as they fell. He used the colors to form an image
of his mother, Melisande, giving her his face, for Bellona had told him last
year on his birthday that he had his mother’s face.

Ven made his mother’s face softer than his, forming it to match the faces of
mothers he’d seen at the faire. Melisande’s face was soft and kind and always
sad, for no matter how hard he tried, he could not imagine her smiling at him,
as other mothers smiled at their children. He hoped that today she might smile,
for it was his birthday, and when he had created her, he reached out his hand
to her.

Another hand—a child’s hand, like his own—took shape and form in his
darkness. The hand was not made up of the colors of his mind, but was formed of
colors of another mind. The child’s hand reached for his hand. . . .

Startled, Ven lost control. The colors swirled about and the image of his
mother and the strange hand vanished in the confusion. He sat hunched in the
cave in the darkness and wondered •what had happened. Another mind had touched
his, that much he knew. As he and Bellona talked with words, the other mind
talked with colors. Ven had heard a voice within the colors, but he hadn’t been
able to understand what it said.

The experience jarred him. He didn’t know whether he liked it or not. In
some ways, it was pleasurable and exciting, and in some ways terrifying. He sat
in the darkness, keeping the colors carefully subdued. He wanted to hear the
voice again, to try to understand it.

He thought about the rabbit snares.

Ven summoned the colors and painted his mother’s face, used her face to bait
the trap. He opened his mind to the vast darkness and waited, impatiently,
expectantly, for the other hand to reappear. When it did, he would grab hold of
it and find out who it was.

A claw, not a hand, reached out of the darkness. The claw seized hold of the
colors and would not let go. The claw tore open his mind, as it might have torn
open a rabbit. The claw roamed around inside him, upended him, dumped out the
contents, turned him inside out. The claw lifted him up. A face filled his
mind—a face with a long snout covered with blue-black scales, snapping jaws and
sharp teeth, red reptile eyes that looked straight at him.

“Where are you?” The words were flame and they burned Yen’s mind. “Tell me
where to find you. . . .”

The pain was unendurable and Ven writhed in agony. He could not run away,
for the claw held him fast, but the darkness could run to him and it did,
flinging its blanket over him, burying him deep.

Ven woke to a pounding headache, sickness, and terror of the beast that had
attacked him. He pressed his cheek to the cold stone floor. The chill helped
ease the nausea. He lay there, shivering and sweating, afraid to leave, afraid
to stay.

Another face filled his mind. Bellona’s face, twisted in anger. Her face was
real and so was the willow branch. The other face—

the dragon’s face—was starting to recede. Wobbly-legged, Ven crept out of
the cave, moving slowly, stealthily, pausing every few steps to look and to
listen.

Nothing came after him.

Ven broke into a run and did not stop until he reached the stream that ran
near their hut. He realized then that he was thirsty, with a terrible taste in
his mouth. Falling to his knees, he scooped up the water with his hand, then
halted, staring at his reflection.

The sight of his face shocked him. He was deathly pale, his eyes wide and
wild. The moment Bellona saw him, she would suspect something had happened and
she would ask questions he did not want to answer. Ven splashed cold water on
his face and pinched his cheeks to bring the blood back. The hour wasn’t as
late as he’d feared. The sun hung from the lower branches of the trees, hadn’t
yet dropped to the ground. He sat in the sunshine and let it warm him and
banish the memory of the dragon.

Ven didn’t know why a dragon was hunting for him, and there was no one to
ask.

He knew better than to mention it to Bellona. Last year, at the faire, he’d
watched a troupe of actors putting on a show about a prince and a damsel and a
dragon. The dragon came on stage in the last scene, for the prince to battle.
(The dragon was not real, of course; even a five-year-old could see that.) The
battle raged. The prince slew the dragon. Ven returned to their tent and, when
Bellona asked him where he had been, he told her or started to tell her.

When he came to the word “dragon,” she rose to her feet. Her face was as
pale as his face had been in the stream. She did not hit him, though he thought
she was going to. Her hands twitched; then the fingers clenched. She turned her
back on him, walked away, and stayed away all that night, leaving him to fend
for himself. They left the faire early that year and lived the poorer for it
that winter.

The sun dropped off the last branch and fell into the horizon.

Ven reached the hut just as night’s first shadows darkened the doorway. He
found Bellona seated at the table, fletching arrows. She cast him her usual
cursory glance, making certain he was still living and breathing; then she
looked back to her work and never took her eyes off it until it was time for
their meal and their beds.

That night, Ven could not sleep. He could hear
something snuffling and pawing outside the hovel, something huge. When he went
out the next morning to see what sort of tracks the beast had left, he saw no
marks in the dirt.

The night had been quiet, Bellona told him, when he asked. That morning,
they set off for the faire.

The Fairfield faire was one of the largest in the kingdom of Idlyswylde. The
city of Fairfield, located on the river Aston, south of the capital,
Ramsgate-upon-the-Aston, was noted for the faire held yearly on the vast piece
of level ground that gave the town its name. Every other day of the year, the
town’s eight hundred residents went about their business in a somnambulant
state, rousing for births and deaths, weddings and the occasional war, but mostly
sleepwalking their way through life. On the week of the faire, the townspeople
opened their eyes, sat up, and looked around at the world.

People from all over their kingdom and surrounding realms poured into
Fairfield, swelling its population by a thousand, filling every inn and the
abbey guesthouse, and spilling out into a colorful, temporary city of tents.
Booths and stalls blossomed on the newly rolled green, their colors outdoing
the spring flowers, their dealers tempting children with sticky treats and
gentlemen with sticky games of chance. Merchants traveled with their goods by
barge down the river Aston or journeyed overland, their pack mules laden with
everything from silk gloves to pet monkeys.

Ven and Bellona did not keep a mule—a luxury too dear for them to afford.
They loaded up the fur pelts in a pushcart to make the fourteen-day journey to
Fairfield on foot. The trip was slow and tedious, especially at the beginning,
for they had to haul the cart through the woods where they made their home,
dragging it over a trail that Bellona had hacked out of the wilderness. No one
else ever ventured on this trail, for Bellona did not tolerate visitors and,
indeed, she had built their dwelling so deep in the forest that only the most
dogged visitor could have found them. Since they used this trail just twice a
year—for the spring faire and the fall—the trail was overgrown with weeds and
brush and difficult to navigate.

Sometimes they found that a tree had fallen across it and then, if they
couldn’t move the tree, they had to either haul the heavily laden cart over the
obstruction or drag the cart through the brush. This arduous task required both
of them, one pulling and one pushing. Ven was unusually strong for a child of
six and he did his share of the hard labor. That was why when Bellona had said
she needed his help, he could not argue with her.

Leaving the forest, they struck the King’s Highway, and the going was
easier, for the road was well maintained. Bellona could pull the cart herself
and she ordered Ven to ride in the cart, perched among the furs, where his
deformity would not be so noticeable. Ven could walk fast and run faster on his
beast’s legs, but he had a strange gait, a loping spring, that brought
strangers up short, evoked rude stares or ruder remarks. And if Ven spent too
much time walking, the sharp claws on his scaled feet would pierce through the
soles of his boots. Any of their fellow travelers who saw shining white claws
instead of pretty pink toes would do more than stop and stare. They would
descry Ven as a demon and slay him on the spot, or so Bellona told him.