The Wizard And The Dragon (26 page)

The
enchanted water was sparkling through its channel in the walls as I looked back
up at my home. It had kept me safe for sixteen years. I wondered how many more
years it had been there for my older counterparts.

I
walked through the small hallway to the front door. When I reached to open it I
felt the hilt of the dagger press against my skin. There was more than a
decade’s worth of energy stored within it now. More gems than I could remember
had been placed into that collection in the study. As the door opened and I
stepped outside, it had not yet crossed my mind that for Tower it had not been
enough to save him.

It was deep into
the evening when I had walked far enough to no longer feel the magic of the
tower. I was confident that I could find my way back by wandering through the
woods but I still stopped when I was no longer aware of its presence. I reached
out and found that I could seek out the tower’s magic if I tried hard enough.
It was like squinting in the distance or stretching up to get something from a
tall shelf.

I
took Candle from my shoulder and put him in my pocket now that the sun had
fully set. His fire made an easy target out of both of us and I had no idea
what lurked amongst the trees. Wizard or not, I would be at a disadvantage in
an ambush. At least the dragon was too big to sneak up on me. I wanted to laugh
at that but I couldn’t.

My
plan was to walk back to my village and meet any of the survivors. If there
were none, I assumed that a year had been long enough for new people to settle
in. Some of the poorer folk from nearby towns could take advantage of the empty
homes and farms, even charred and ruined as they were.

From
the villagers I would learn if the dragon had attacked elsewhere. My home may
have been the first in a string of attacks, or part of a longer chain that I
had been too young to hear about. The information in the beastiary seemed to
imply that a dragon would stay and dominate a specific territory for a while.
Perhaps a year wasn’t long enough for it to move on and it would be relatively
close.

An
hour passed before I reached the edge of the trees. I marveled at how far I ran
when I was boy and then remembered how frightened I had been. I stepped out
into the clearing and saw that I had veered too far south while walking from
the tower. There was a stretch of fields and farmland between where I stood and
the village. Another hour of walking at least.

It
was a cloudless night but I still should not have been able to make out the
village in the dark. I felt a lurch in my chest when I saw the fire in the
distance, as if the buildings were still burning a year later. I calmed myself
and reasoned that the new inhabitants had a purpose for the fire. Still, it was
unsettling to see the pillars of smoke on the horizon. I had ran away from them
as a boy and now I marched in their direction.

The
river was on the other side of the village. I decided to cut through the
farmland to the road that ran from the south. There was a point where it ran
closely to the river and I could stop there before following the road. I didn’t
want it to look like I was sneaking my way to the walls through the fields.

I
thought of what state my home would be in as I walked toward the road. I
wondered if I could use my magic to help with rebuilding before moving on to
the dragon. Most of the houses had been severely damaged in the fire. The
tavern’s roof had been destroyed but some of the walls were still standing when
I last saw it. I tried not to think of my old house and its exposed, burning
frame.

The
farms I walked through now should have been full of crops. The earth had healed
and no longer showed signs of the dragon’s fire but that was all that had
recovered. The homes I passed had collapsed and crumbled after being left to
burn. This time last year I would have been chased out by the farmers, angry
that a boy might be trying to steal some of their food. Now the fields were
abandoned and empty and wrong.

The
people who had reclaimed the village were obviously not numerous enough to
populate the surrounding farms. As I stepped onto the road I was a little
closer to the village walls. In the dark, with the smoke rising above it, it
looked like a dried out husk on the landscape. I hoped it did not look so dead
on the inside.

“Careful
now,” someone said and I whipped around on the road.

My
eyes had been transfixed on the village walls. I had not checked the road or
the river. The person was standing near a campfire between the two, a few
meters from the road and closer to the water. There was a horse tied to the
closest tree in the camp. It didn’t seem to care that I was nearby.

“Easy,”
the person spoke again. It was a woman’s voice. The fire behind her was a small
one and she had a hood over her head. I couldn’t see her face in the dark. Her
clothes were dark, brown or black I couldn’t tell without a better light, and
she had a hand at her waist. She was ready to grab the hilt of a sword there if
she needed it. She hadn’t drawn it yet and I wasn’t going to give her a reason.

“I’m
just walking by,” I said. “I wouldn’t have came so close if I had seen you
here.”

“Which
way?” she asked without taking her hand from her belt.

“Which
way what?”

“Are
you going? Which way are you going?” she repeated.

“North,”
I said and pointed over my shoulder without turning my head.

“Are
you here for the bounty?”

“There’s
a bounty on the dragon?”

“Dragon?”
there was a crack of amusement in her voice and I saw her shoulders relax. She
took her hand from her side and I felt the tension drain away as she laughed. I
felt like I had said something stupid but I still kept a loose connection to
the harness under my shirt. I wasn’t fully relaxed just yet.

“No,
not the dragon,” she said as she stepped back away from me. She must have
decided I wasn’t going to attack her or that I wasn’t a threat even if I did. I
didn’t know how to feel about that. “A dragon hasn’t been killed in a thousand
years. The bounty is for the trolls up there,” she motioned her head in the
direction I had pointed.

“Trolls,”
I said. Stronger and more agile than their farren brethren and usually twice
the size of a human. Intelligent enough to live and hunt in groups and use
primitive tools. They could regenerate just like the farren but they could
still see, albeit poorly. I strained to think of more I had read in the
beastiary. Were they resistant to magic? I didn’t think so.

“Yes,”
she said as she stepped toward the campfire. She pulled down her hood as she
turned from me. Her hair stopped at her shoulders and was as dark as her
clothes. In the firelight they looked to be made of a coarse leather, far too
heavy to wear in the summer heat. She must have been wearing it for protection.

“This
village,” she continued, speaking down to the fire, “was destroyed about a year
ago. There were a few survivors. They began rebuilding but the trolls came in a
few months ago. Not enough people were here to fend them off. They killed the
survivors and have stayed here since. If you’re heading north you’ll have to go
around. I’d cross the river too, just to be safe.”

“And
the bounty?” I growled. My teeth were set firmly against each other. I had just
found out about the survivors and how they had died in the same breath.

“Posted
to clear the road for the traders that pass through here. You’re not here for
it? I thought I was the first to see it.”

“No,
but I’d like to help. I had,” I hesitated for a moment. Giving too much
information might lead to questions that I couldn’t answer without sounding
crazy. “I had friends that lived here. I only recently heard about the dragon
attack. Not the trolls, though.”

“And
you came to fight the dragon?” she smiled at me as she said the words, a smile
that made it plain that it wasn’t a serious question. “You can help if you can
fight. Can you?”

I
nodded and tried to think how much I should explain. She stepped toward me, her
back to the fire, and looked me over. She circled me once and I stood there,
tense as she did so. I wondered if she thought that I was odd or acted strange.
My isolated life may have taught me many things, but talking with people wasn’t
one of them.

“You
have the arms of a swordsman but no sword. The dagger under your shirt won’t
help you against a troll. You’re obviously not a farmer but not a soldier
either. A miner or a smith, I’d guess. You can’t fight,” she spoke firmly, but
not harshly. Still, I took it as an insult.

“Magic,”
I muttered, and then continued louder. “I can use magic.”

“Magic!”
she said and her eyes widened. “You’re far too young to be a wizard. Don’t
lie.”

I
looked closely at her in the dim firelight, suddenly wondering how old this
woman was to label me as too young to do anything. There didn’t seem to be any
signs of aging on her face or gray in her hair. I felt foolish as I tried to
judge her appearance when she was the first person I had seen in sixteen years.

“I’m
not a liar,” I said simply.

“And
what is your name, young wizard?”

“Tower,”
I said and was surprised that it wasn’t ‘Bryce’ that came out of my mouth.

“That’s
a funny name,” she said and another smile spread over her face. “Oh, sorry,
that was rude of me,” she added as the smile grew into a grin. I couldn’t tell
if it meant she was very sorry or not sorry at all.

“And
you?” I asked.

“Kate,”
she replied, still grinning. “Show me some magic then. If you really are a
wizard you can help.”

She
took one step back from me and stared at me, certain that I was about to make a
fool of myself and already amused by it. I had a moment of doubt as I stood
there, on the edge of her campfire’s light. I had nothing to prove to this
woman and I felt confident that I could handle the trolls alone if they were
anything like their farren cousins.

Yet
I found myself mentally flipping through my list of spells for something
flashy, something to wipe the grin from her face. I remembered something Tower
had shown me when I had been a boy, a display of power that seemed so
impossible.

I
held out my hand and focused a burst of energy there, drawing it from the
harness around my torso. The flames appeared on my forearm and swirled down to
collect above my palm. I saw Kate’s eyes narrow at my hand in the second before
I unleashed the energy and then it was gone, lost behind the column of fire
that spiked into the air between us.

“Enough!
The trolls will see!” she hissed at me and I snapped my hand closed. Her mouth
was a straight line as she looked at me now, as if she couldn’t believe what
she was seeing. “What are you?”

“A
wizard, like I said.”

“No,
I’ve met other wizards,” she said and took another step back from me. “You can
help, but you stay behind me. The bounty isn’t important. I’ll split it with
you but the trolls are mine after we kill them. Deal?”

“Trolls
are yours after?” I started to ask and then stopped. It wasn’t important.
“Deal.”

Her
eyes lingered on me for a moment as though she was looking at a puzzle that she
couldn’t solve. I wondered if she was deciding whether or not to attack me. I
kept myself tethered to the energy stored in the harness until she backed away
again. The old wizard of my village had been a liked man even though he had
been a recluse. Were wizards regarded differently in other parts of the world
for her to react in such a way?

Kate
walked around the campfire now. She added a knife to her belt to accompany her
sword and then went next to her horse. There were saddle bags near the animal
that I hadn’t noticed before. She carefully searched through them and I heard
the clinking of glass as she shifted things around.

I
moved next to the fire and tried to peer over her shoulder at what she was
doing. There were more bottles than I thought could possibly fit in the bags
she had. They were various sizes. The larger ones looked empty while the
smaller ones were filled with all sorts of fluid. Some looked like blood but
were too viscous. Others looked like water but were dark, rich colors.

“You’re
an alchemist,” I said and remembered the equipment in the tower’s study that I
had never touched.

“And
you’re a wizard,” she repeated plainly without turning to me.

“Why
are you here for trolls?”

She
ignored me. She pulled out a bottle from the bag and stood up. The contents of
it were as clear as water but with hundreds of black bubbles floating within
it. They looked strange, too perfectly spherical to be natural. She held the
bottle to the campfire and the bubbles shrunk to tiny specks in the light. I
suddenly wished I had experimented with the apparatus in the study.

“Do
you know a spell to see in the dark?” she asked.

“No,”
I said. All those years in the underground and I had never thought to try that.

“Take
some of this then,” she said as she opened the bottle and held it toward me.

The
bubbles were inflating now that I was blocking the firelight. I scrunched up my
nose into a grimace as I looked down at it. I wasn’t about to drink something
the first stranger I met offered me. Plus it didn’t look like it would taste
pleasant.

“No
thanks. You can drink it,” I said.

She
rolled her eyes.

“It
won’t hurt you. And I never said to drink it,” she leaned her head in close to
me.

I
kept my eyes on her face, not wanting to blink in case she was going to strike
me. Which was exactly what she wanted me to do. She abruptly raised the bottle
and then stopped it, splashing some of the liquid up into my eyes. I shot my
hands up and started wiping the liquid away. It didn’t burn or hurt but the
shock of it was enough to send me into a panic.

“Oh
stop it, open your eyes and let it settle.”

I
gathered my focus and readied myself to make a crater out of the camp site if I
was blind. I opened my eyes and immediately lost my grasp on the magic,
awestruck at how the night had been transformed. Every star in the cloudless
sky looked thrice as bright. The light of the moon was too much to look at
directly, but the water of the river caught its gleam as it illuminated the
countryside. I could see as though it was a sunny day, and it was the colors of
the world that were washed out and darkened, rather than a light that gave
everything a pale glow.