The Dragon & the Alpine Star

by Allison Norfolk

  “I know. But I want you to know the offer is always open. Here.” Frau Beck handed her one of her packets of dry meat and a wheel of cheese. She also proffered a small cloth bag. “This tea won't take the place of medicine, but it will help your grandmother rest. You, as well. It's just from the mint that grows everywhere, so don't imagine you owe me. It cost nothing to pick it.”

  Kristina looked like she wanted to argue, but restrained herself and said, “Thank you.”

  “Good day,” said Frau Beck with a nod. “I'll try to bring you and your grandmother some berries from the mountain on the way back.”

  “I'm sure she'll enjoy them,” replied Kristina.

  “Don't encourage her,” came a cold voice from a few feet away. Both Kristina and Frau Beck looked up to find the bergermeister's wife, a stout woman who always wore ribbons in her hair, glaring down at them.

  “I help everyone in need, Dame Telle,” Frau Beck said calmly. “You know that.”

  “And a waste of time it is, on ones like this,” Dame Telle sneered. “And you, girl, how many times do I have to tell you that you should throw yourself and that grandmother of yours on the nuns of the Holy Spirit in Bern. They'll take you both in, see that you're fed and clothed properly.”

  “My grandmother can't stand the journey,” said Kristina, with the patience of someone who has had to say the same thing hundreds of times. “And the change of scenery would upset her too much even if we were to make it. She's better in our house.”

  At least Dame Telle had just enough compassion not to suggest that Kristina abandon her steadily-worsening grandmother entirely. She just snorted and stalked away.

  Frau Beck put a hand on Kristina's shoulder. The younger woman flinched away, and Frau Beck winced at the mistake. Kristina did not like to be touched; she was as skittish in her own way as any stray cat. Frau Beck knew from observing her, though even Kristina herself did not, that Kristina had a weak heart, exacerbated by the way she starved herself to feed her grandmother and by the thin mountain air. But that stubborn streak kept Kristina in place day after day, refusing all offers of help, determined despite her constant exhaustion to make do on her own. Powerful she might be, but Frau Beck could only do so much, and casting spells on someone without even tacit permission—except in the rare cases of self-defense—violated the rules every trained hedgewitch lived by.

  “I'm sorry,” she said aloud.

  Kristina was still glaring after Dame Telle. “Can't you turn her into something? The rumor is that you're a witch,” she muttered.

  “No,” Frau Beck said. “It's against the oaths I took during my apprenticeship as a healer to do harm with any knowledge I have. Much as I might want to sweeten her tea with something to give her the runs once in awhile.”

  And she'd risk any spell she cast in anger rebounding upon herself—that was why hedgewitches never cast spells but to help people. Spells cast for anything but the purest of motives almost always came back to harm the caster and it was a risk few hedgewitches dared run. Of course she couldn't explain that without violating the other biggest rule—keeping magic a secret and letting as few people as possible know she was a witch. She'd gotten away with the big spell on the shepherd boy Hans because there were no witnesses to it other than the boy himself, and it had been easy to persuade him and his cousin Karl on a follow-up visit that that panic had exaggerated the injury's severity in both of their minds. People might say she was a witch, but she took great care that no one actually had any concrete proof of it and anything she did could be written off by logical people as extensive knowledge of her profession as an herb-woman and midwife.

  Well, almost anything. She did make occasional exceptions if she thought circumstances warranted, if the only way to help someone was if they knew she could do actual magic. But she could count those times on one hand, and so far none had come back to bite her.

  After all, who in the light of day believed in witches in the enlightened twentieth century? They had autos and telephones and electricity. They thought science explained everything.

  Kristina giggled at the image of Dame Telle stuck in the privy for a day. “A good clean-out never hurt anyone. That's what my grandmother used to say when she fed me castor oil.”

  Frau Beck snorted. “I'll keep it in mind for the next time she vexes me. In the meantime, I won't forget those berries. Good day to you, Miss Kristina.”

  “Good day,” Kristina returned, and Frau Beck moved on towards the edge of town.

  Soon she'd left all sign of people behind her, climbing ever higher. The snow had melted more since her little adventure rescuing Hans and Karl and light spring green was starting to peek out everywhere. Birdsong whistled from the pine trees, and little streams of icy snowmelt water chattered by. Frau Beck hiked up her woolen skirts to jump the streams, only getting a wet hem once. Her boots were soon an inch or two deep in mud but she kept walking.

  Much of her time wandering the mountains the previous summer had been to get the lay of the land up here, and figure out where the herbs she needed were likely to grow. Now she returned to those spots, and in most cases was gratified by what she found.

  A day's full wander found her on a tiny patch of grass on a cliff, barely big enough to be called a meadow but big enough for her to make a camp for the night without worrying about falling or getting blown off. She cast a spell to keep herself toasty warm rolled in her single blanket and slept.

  Morning high in the mountains was always something to behold. Frau Beck made sure she was awake just before dawn so that she could sit at her little campfire, sip hot tea, and watch the sun rise and turn the ghostly white peaks around her pink and then yellow-orange.

  “I hope you can see this from where you are,” she murmured under her breath, not certain to whom she addressed this speech but feeling compelled to say it. “There's no finer sight in the world. Except perhaps sunsets in the mountains after a good day’s work.”

  Once the sun had risen high enough to warm the air around her a little, she packed up camp and set off again. A bumper crop of early edelweiss distracted her, and moving from patch to patch she suddenly looked up at about midafternoon and realized she didn't recognize her surroundings. This was a small valley she had never been to before.

  Glancing around, however, she did note a few familiar crags to the east and was certain she could find her way back when the time came. She was in no rush to return to Brig, as she still had supplies for another few days and in an extremity could subsist on foraged plants and berries. So she continued to follow the patches of edelweiss to the far end of the valley and a very thick grove of pines.

  Pines this dense meant not much could grow underneath them, between the blanket of trees themselves and the carpet of needles on the ground. So Frau Beck skirted the grove and began to make her way around, pressing close to the sheer rock that made up the wall of the valley. About ten minutes' walk brought her to the mouth of a cave.

  Mountain caves were not places to be taken lightly. All kinds of dangers lurked there, from wildlife to rock falls to chasms. But caves also tended to be homes to moss and a few other things useful to a clever hedgewitch. A few seconds’ debate was all that decided her. Since she didn’t have a lantern or any other way of carrying a light, she reasoned she wouldn’t go very far in, just far enough to see if there was anything growing within sight that she could use. She left her pack at the cave mouth so that carrying it wouldn’t unbalance her.

  The cave was large; the opening alone stood four times as tall as the top of Frau Beck’s head and was equally wide. The floor of it wasn’t smooth and there were a lot of large boulders to work her way around or over but in the end the light started to fade past a gradual bend in the cave.

  The sound of dripping water attracted her and she veered in the direction she thought might be the source, though the echoes in the cave and dim light made it hard to pinpoint. A glisten to one side told her the wall might be slick, and indicated a good possibili
ty of moss from the damp.

  Just as Frau Beck was getting close to being able to touch the wall over which a faint curtain of water ran, she thought she heard rock shifting behind her. She froze.

  Then a low, threatening growl came echoing out of the darker recesses at the back of the cave. Frau Beck felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and she mentally swore at her own recklessness. She had gambled that nothing had taken up residence in this cave, and the gamble had not paid off. Now she would just have to hope she could outsmart whatever lived here and escape with her life.

  Slowly she turned so that her back was to the wall. Her darting gaze couldn’t detect any movement, nor gleam of animal eyes out of the semi-darkness. But another growl sounded, and this one was definitely closer than the last. Frau Beck swore silently again. Whatever it was she had disturbed, it was very large; she could tell by the depth and resonance of the growl.

  She reached into her pocket for the packet of mixed herbs she kept there and grasped a good-sized pinch between thumb and forefinger. This particular mix when thrown in the face of an opponent and activated by her magic would disrupt all the senses a predator normally used to track prey: sight, smell, and hearing, for about ten minutes, which should be plenty of time for her to grab up her pack and escape. In the meantime, she kept edging towards the cave’s mouth, sliding her boots along the cave floor without lifting them to minimize the noise she made. Bolting was the worst thing she could do at this point as it would encourage the animal to chase, and she’d have her back to whatever it was. Still, her muscles quivered as all her instincts clamored that she run as far and as fast as she possibly could.

  A trickle of cold sweat worked its way down her neck as she slid ever closer to freedom, her eyes wide and still scanning for any movement in the cave.

  Just as she reached the point where if she looked down she could detect what colors her clothing was again, something positively enormous leapt at her out of the darkness. Frau Beck’s confused eyes managed to make out something several times larger than any bear, something greenish, before a mouth full of sharp teeth loomed up, jaws wide. The tiny part of her brain that wasn’t screaming in panic wondered how something so huge had managed to conceal itself so well. But her hand had been primed to throw, so she flung her pinch of herbs at the oncoming mouth, sent the plants a twist of mental power to activate the spell, and darted towards the daylight as fast as her feet could carry her over the rocky ground. A cry of fear and adrenaline burst from her lips, spurring her legs onward. An outraged roar from behind her drowned her out.

  She just reached the barrier between sunlight and shadow when something big hit her across the shoulders from behind and knocked her sprawling. She just managed to catch herself on her forearms and prevent her face from smacking the ground. Flipping over, she sat back on her behind, preparing to get her legs under her and continue fleeing, but the sight of what followed her out of the cave made her freeze in equal parts horror and wonder.

  It was no bear or wolf, as she had originally feared. It was a…the word her mind fixated on was dragon, though this creature had no wings. It was a green-brown, scaled lizard with a long, flexible neck, so huge that its back nearly touched the top of the cave mouth, and it was able to walk over boulders that stood as high as Frau Beck’s waist without trouble. Its long, forked tail lashed, and Frau Beck realized that must be what had knocked her over. If it had tried to get its teeth around her again, it would easily have bitten her in half.

  The creature threw back its head and roared. The sound echoed off the mountain peaks and Frau Beck found herself literally shaking in her boots as it vibrated through her very bones.

  She was dead; she just hadn’t stopped breathing yet. Her magic was powerful, and she could tell by the way the mammoth lizard’s dark greenish eyes swiveled to follow her when she tried to scrabble backwards that her sense-confusing spell hadn’t affected it much. Perhaps she needed a handful of herbs for something so large, but she wasn’t going to have time to reach into her pocket and extract any. There would be no running from a creature this size, either, on open ground it would simply chase her down, and in the trees it could knock them over in her wake until one crushed her like the rabbit she was compared to it.

  So she did the only thing it occurred to her to do: she stood up, spread her hands in a gesture of surrender, and started walking forward.

  Perhaps in a few seconds, she’d be seeing Allen and Karl and even old Frau Heller again at last.

  Chapter 4

  The female human startles him with her intrusion; no humans usually come to this remote valley, and certainly not so early in spring. If he hadn’t been woken up from hibernation at the back of the cave by the sounds of an interloper, he might not have reacted so hastily and announced his presence by growling. As it is, he is already in the act of leaping upon her by the time his senses start to catch up.

  She throws something at him then that smells of dead plant matter and something else, something indescribable that he has only smelled once before in the moment he entered the world. It is that fleeting bit of wafting scent-memory that brings him up short and keeps him from tearing her head from her shoulders by pure instinct.

  By the time he recovers she has made it to the cave mouth. But now he’s curious as well as angry, and he can’t let her escape from here regardless. That would bring men with their swords and spears and he would be driven even from this remote place and there’s nowhere left for him to go. So he thwacks her with his tail to knock her over. All he plans to do is get a better look at this scrap of humankind, and then decide whether to just kill her or to knock her senseless and carry her somewhere far away where once she wakes—if the elements or his fellow beasts don’t get to her first—she’ll write the entire thing off as a frightening dream and count herself lucky to have escaped alive. She won’t know how to get back to his valley, nor will she particularly want to.

  He’s pulled this trick before, and there’s no reason to think it won’t work again. He hates killing humans unless he has absolutely no other choice to stay free.

  She rolls to face him, and he can see the whites of her eyes as she realizes what she’s seeing. He notices the gray in her braided and coiled hair; she’s older than most who dare the mountain heights, certainly older than any human woman he’s ever seen wandering about on her own. Her scent, however, tells him that she’s younger than the gray would indicate. There’s nothing special about her, really, despite her foolhardiness in venturing alone this far from human settlement. He roars a challenge and flares out his neck-frill, to make certain she’s good and scared.

  He waits for her to scream, or cower, or faint, or start scrabbling about for things to throw at him. All reactions he’s seen before, when he hasn’t been able to hide. Instead, she stares for a few seconds, taking him in. Then she gets to her feet, and to his shock she begins to walk towards him. She has no weapon—he can see this because she’s deliberately keeping her hands well in his view. Her mouth is open, and she’s almost smiling.

  “Hello, beautiful thing. I’ve never seen a wonder like you before. It’s an honor. What are you?” she says in German. She stops in easy snapping distance, though not close enough to reach out and touch his scales. “Are you a dragon?” she whispers.

  He’s heard this one too many times. “No,” he snaps before he can think. Sleepiness must have stripped him of his inhibitions; normally he would pretend to be a dumb wild beast.

  “I am a lindworm,” he growls.

  -0-0-0-

  It was only slightly more shocking to hear the creature before her speak, in perfectly intelligible German, than to behold the creature itself. After all, if an enormous unnatural lizard existed, then why shouldn’t it also be able to speak a human language? Frau Beck lived too much in a world of wonder, as a hedgewitch able to perform magic that most people believed impossible, to have closed her mind to other so-called impossibilities. If someone had offered her proof of other ki
nds of magic beyond her own, she would have believed wholeheartedly. And, well, here it was.

  “A lindworm. My apologies.” She vaguely thought she might have read of such a creature before, perhaps in one of Frau Heller's dustier books, but she couldn't remember any details. Not that it mattered what kind of giant lizard was about to consume her. The teeth were just as sharp either way. “Well, Herr Lindworm, I would appreciate a swift death, if you can forgive my mistake.”

  It—he? the voice had sounded male, though with a creature this size it might not matter—opened his mouth to speak again, seemed to think better of it, and closed his mouth again. They stared at one another for a few long, breathless seconds. His forked tail lashed once. He made a grumbling noise deep in his throat, and then he shook his head.

  “You are a woman of some nerve. Such courage is hardly deserving of death. If you will leave my valley at once and swear on whatever you hold most sacred that you will tell no one of seeing me, then you may depart in peace.”

  Frau Beck felt almost a mild sting of disappointment, of which she was instantly ashamed. However ready she might or might not be to die, the world apparently wasn't done with her yet. “I thank you, Herr Lindworm, for my life. I swear on my own power that I will tell no one of what I have seen today.” She picked a handful of pine needles from the ground and sprinkled them on herself, casting a small binding spell to hold her to her word. Pine needles were good for that kind of permanence.

  His nostrils flared and his nose snuffled closer. “What was that you just did? I thought I smelled, back in the cave—” He broke off.

  “You can smell that?” How interesting. I wish I had more time to study this creature, now that it seems to have changed its mind about killing me, she thought. “Well, that was a spell to bind me to my promise. I am a hedgewitch, and I can cast magic using plants as my conduit.”

  “A hedge-witch?” he repeated. “I have never heard the word before, though I think I may have encountered one of your ilk briefly, long ago. I smelled something like your spell once.”