She realized she was quoting what her mentor Frau Heller had said to her after she’d come to, groggy with heartbreak and lingering pain, a few days following Allen’s death. She didn’t remember anything that had happened after blacking out in the tavern, but when she had awoken, she had been snugly tucked in her own bed and for a moment tried to pretend the entire thing was a nightmare. A glance around had disabused her of any further happy delusions. Frau Heller, not Allen, sat in a chair beside the bed. There was a wooden rocking cradle on the floor with a small, wrapped cooing thing ensconced within, and she realized her belly was much smaller, and it still ached a little with a residual feeling of the loss of a thing that had been as close as her own heartbeat but was now separate forever.
“You and the baby almost died,” Frau Heller said without preamble. “But you have a healthy son. And now, girl, you must put aside any feelings you have about the death of your husband if you want either of you to live out the year. For your son’s sake, you must forget you ever had a husband. You cannot afford any other emotions, and you have to be strong. You are on your own.”
“I threw myself into raising Karl,” Frau Beck recalled, staring sightlessly out at the mountain view. “I didn’t—couldn’t—think about Allen, because I had a job to do. At first I didn’t give myself a moment to relax because if I did I was afraid I would fall apart. And then it just became the way things had always been. And then the war came, and then Karl was gone too, and I had nothing. I want to shout at them both for leaving me here. But it won’t bring them back.”
“No, but pretending they never existed is wearying beyond words,” said Herr Lindworm. He kept his tail around her, but shifted his head so that the side of his jaw nearly touched her skirts.
“It is,” she agreed. She heard the same weight of loneliness in his words that she often felt in her own chest. One hand reached out and began to stroke his muzzle. A hum deep in his throat managed to combine sounds of pleasure and sadness, and all of a sudden she was sobbing.
She cried as she had not allowed herself to do in all these years, as she had not done since sitting in that tavern next to Allen’s still, silent, empty shell. She buried her face in her thick skirt to muffle the sound, one arm clutched desperately around her legs, squeezing in on herself hard. And all the time her other hand kept stroking the lindworm’s muzzle.
When her tears finally began to slow, she put up both hands to wipe her face, still shuddering a little with the sobs. Herr Lindworm lifted his head from the ground where it had been beside her, tilted his chin back, and roared. Never had a sound consumed her so fully, and never had a sound so encompassed her own feelings of fury and helplessness and loss. She added her voice to his, screaming wordlessly her pent-up rage to the listening heavens. The sound continued bouncing and echoing for several long seconds after they fell silent. Then it, too, died away and all that could be heard was a distant whistle of wind.
Then a bird chirped, somewhere on their own mountain. Frau Beck managed a smile. She stood on shaky legs and made her way back to the stream for a drink and to splash her hot face. The water was so cold it seemed to bring everything into sharp, clear focus. She gasped with the shock of it.
Herr Lindworm had followed her back, and when she was finished he delicately sipped from the stream. Once he was finished a shudder rippled its way from his nostrils to the very tip of his tail.
“Shall we go back?” he asked, in a quiet, gravelly voice.
She nodded, and once she had gathered everything in her pack he lowered himself for her to clamber onto his back once again. He took the descent down the cliff in a sort of controlled jump-and-slide that managed not to dislodge her when they reached the bottom. The light continued to fade as they made their way back to his valley and the space in front of his cave, and it was nearly dark when Frau Beck’s feet finally touched the ground again.
She made another campfire in silence, heating her own supper and sausages for him as she allowed herself to think about her husband and son in a way she hadn’t since they had gone. She didn’t cry again, but she was so lost in memories that she nearly burned the food before she came back to the present. Herr Lindworm did nothing to disturb the silence, and for that she was grateful.
Once he had finished his sausages and she still had a few bites to go, she asked, “What was your father like?” Her voice sounded as if she’d spent all day at the bottom of a coal mine, but at least she hadn’t lost it entirely. She put a mug of mint tea with a bit of dried lemon peel to heat on the fire, spelled to soothe her throat.
“He was magnificent,” Herr Lindworm said. He kept his eyes on the flames before them, but his gaze had turned distant, inward. “He came to find me after I ran from my mother’s birthing room. Lindworms are able to look after themselves from the moment we’re born, we aren’t helpless for years like human infants, but we can easily get ourselves killed by terrified humans. We don’t know what it is to be afraid, or to be cautious. We have to be taught how to hide. He named me. He taught me everything there was to know about survival in a world that is hostile to our kind. He told me stories, showed me hunting techniques. When I hit my growth and could never seem to get enough to eat, he brought me kills from his own territory. He was everything to me. He was the only one who understood, even though we saw each other but rarely.”
“How did he die?” she asked.
“He was killed taking a cow for me from a herder. I was growing so fast at the time that it seemed I could no sooner finish a meal than my belly began to growl for more. My father knew it was dangerous to take too much from one area or humans would notice, but he was desperate to feed us both and took a chance. I arrived too late to save him, but I was able to get him far enough away that the human who shot him wouldn’t find his body before he collapsed. The last thing he did was make me swear that I would not avenge him, that I would live to carry on our kind no matter what. I honored his wish and disappeared into the mountains rather than attack the human village as I longed to do. So I know, oh how I know, what it is to be angry and have nowhere to put your rage.”
“For what it’s worth, I am glad you refrained. In all likelihood you would have been killed, and then we would not have met.”
He glanced sharply at her, pulled from his own reverie. She stood and came over to stroke him just above the eye. “I am grateful for today. You gave me an invaluable gift, showing me that beautiful meadow and getting me to realize how much I’ve been hiding from my grief.”
“I, too,” he said, leaning into her touch just slightly and half-closing the eye she could see. “I am glad you stumbled into my cave that day.”
Chapter 8
Late Spring, 1920. Bern, Switzerland
Frau Beck spent most of the walk back to Brig a few days later planning and strategizing. It was clear to her now that her research in town would be pointless. None of the women she was considering felt like the right fit, and she was pretty sure her research in the library would get her nowhere. She needed to broaden her scope, and for that, she would have to travel.
She knew both the Swiss city of Bern and the Italian city of Milan had large libraries, and she decided after weighing the options to try Bern first. Her Italian was still not as good as she would like it to be, though if she found nothing of use in Bern she would have to do her best. She was now determined that there had to be a solution to the difficulty of a new lindworm that would satisfy both her and Herr Lindworm. It might take several weeks, or months, to hear back from her fellow hedgewitches, and in the meantime she could go to Bern and back rather than sit around Brig and wait.
She debated what to tell Herr Lindworm himself. Finally, she paused in a shaded valley that she was sure was deserted and waited for him to catch up—he had insisted upon following her again, even though she had told him that this time there was no need to worry. He had stayed at a distance so that if any human saw her she would appear to be alone, but he could hear and come easily if she called for hel
p. After a few minutes of seeing that she had stopped walking intentionally and wasn’t removing a stone from her shoe or some other minor thing, he came creeping through the trees.
“What is it? Are you all right?” he asked.
She explained her frustration with her lack of answers to his problem, and that she planned to go on a trip that might take her a few weeks to see if she might find something in the bigger city. He listened gravely, and said nothing for a little while after she finished.
“If you object, I won’t go,” she said hastily. “Perhaps I’m being too interfering again. But I want to help you if I can find any way to do so.”
“And I do appreciate your determination. You may yet be able to find something in human records. I’d never considered it before, but then I have never had a human willing to go places that I cannot in order to help me. I begin to believe it actually might be possible, with your help.”
She smiled, warm inside despite a whip of chill mountain air that pulled at her skirt at that moment. And thus she bid Herr Lindworm farewell once again and made her way back into Brig.
There was much to do if she were to undertake such a long trip. Likely she would be gone several weeks at least, and she wanted to be certain that her patients were taken care of in the meantime. Thus she visited everyone she sold to again, explaining that she was going to Bern to purchase some rarer imported herbs and flowers that she could not get in the mountains and she was happy to supply anything they thought they might need in advance. No one seemed to find her journey worthy of even an eyebrow raise, especially since it was getting closer to summer and the weather would be at its best for travel through the mountains.
The rest of her time she spent choosing what she would need and packing for the trip. At least she wouldn’t have to walk; there was a slow-moving train that ran several times per week. Unless an avalanche or some other catastrophic disaster blocked the tracks, the journey itself would take less than a day. And so it did; she left Brig in the morning and arrived on a golden late afternoon.
She was sure it was only her imagination that unseen eyes followed the train’s progress through the mountains.
Finding a hotel that she could afford that was safe for a woman alone was trickier than handling the train, but she managed in the end. Unfortunately, it was not near the large, main library but Frau Beck didn’t mind the walk through the city. Compared to sloughing over the mountains, it was easy.
She located an older librarian—someone she deemed likely to know his collection as well as he knew his own name—and asked for help finding materials on strange and mythical creatures. She resisted as best she could his friendly queries as to why she wanted the information, but sensing when he began to get frustrated with her determined vagueness she asked just to be taken to the section.
“The stacks are not open for just anyone to browse,” he said. “I must fetch what you want, or get one of the pages to fetch the books for you.” And indeed, now that she thought to look Frau Beck noticed that the front of the library was designed for reading and study, but there were no shelves within reach. Behind the desk, the shelves were just visible through thick, decorative wrought iron bars.
Frau Beck’s heart sank. “Then, please, I would like to start with the oldest bestiary you have and work my way forward.”
“Very well, madam, if that is what you wish,” he said a little stiffly. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked the iron door behind him, and disappeared into the shelves, closing the door very firmly behind him. A minute or two later he reappeared with a thick tome bound in black leather. The edges were decorated in flaking gold, and she could see more gold spiraling on the cracked cover. The librarian insisted she put on a pair of very thin undyed linen gloves before handling it, but eventually let her cart it off to a table with a bright lamp in the middle to examine her find.
The book did indeed have a section on lindworms that occupied several pages, and Frau Beck took notes in a little notebook she’d brought with her that she normally used for spell recipes and ideas. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping to find, but anything could turn out to be helpful. As it turned out, she was not at all sure about the accuracy of a great deal of what she found—the book claimed that lindworms were a sub-variety of a greater family that included dragons, among other things—but she figured if she wrote it down know she could ask Herr Lindworm later.
Once finished, she returned the book and asked for another. Thus began a ritual that was enacted every day for the next week, and though the librarian (she made certain always to ask the same one) was unfailingly patient with her odd requests, Frau Beck found less and less with each subsequent volume that she hadn’t already recorded from another source. Many sources simply copied an earlier one word-for-word.
Finally she slammed the last volume closed with perhaps more vehemence than was necessary, earning a reproving look from the librarian. ‘I am so sorry,’ she mouthed to him, before returning and massaging her aching temples.
This strategy was getting her nowhere, and she still had no ideas. The few books that speculated about how lindworms reproduced just repeated the same story of tricking a queen or a princess into bearing twins, one of which was unfailingly a lindworm. Interestingly, some books claimed that the human child was always a son, a guaranteed heir, but since Herr Lindworm himself had directly contradicted this Frau Beck decided that the original author or authors must have had a very small sample size from which to draw. If they had ever encountered a lindworm at all and weren’t just recording oral lore passed to themselves from their own masters. Frau Beck could well believe this might have been the case, since her own formal education from Frau Heller had proceeded along similar lines.
But it didn’t help her now. What would really help would be a chance to peruse what the librarian called ‘the stacks’ on her own, without having to filter her requests through another person. The librarian might know his collection, but she couldn’t be any more specific about what she was looking for. The last thing she wanted, however unlikely, was someone guessing why she really wanted all of these sources that mentioned lindworms.
She had an idea. It was a terrible idea, but it was the best she could think of that would give her time alone in the forbidden region of the library.
The library was always closed on Sundays, so Frau Beck planned her incursion for the darkest hour of a Sunday morning. That way even if she got lost in her research she would still have time to exit with no one the wiser. At around midnight, she cast the spell that would let her pass virtually invisible to anyone who looked at her and set off for the library through the darkened streets. The lock on the library door was the work of another simple spell, though admittedly one she had little reason to use often.
After hopping the desk that barricaded the rest of the room from the iron bars, she spent a few careful minutes perusing the thick manual that explained what was in each section of the stacks and where the sections were located. The moonlight was just strong enough that she could read it without giving herself a headache. A second spell took care of the lock on the iron door behind the desk. Only once safely ensconced in the deepest regions of the shelves did she dare light a very small lamp, one shaded to only cast the littlest amount of light directly in front of her, and proceed down the seemingly endless corridors lined with books.
She was very glad she had memorized exactly where she wanted to look or she would have been hopelessly lost within seconds. In the dim light everything looked alike, and the general smell of leather, paper, ink and a bit of dust took on almost a life of its own, seeming to float in the air before her like the ghost of a phantom librarian, tempting her to turn down the wrong paths.
Her first stop, the section on magical creatures, yielded what she expected: the librarian had shown her everything he could think of and there was little else to be gleaned. The nearby section on magic was too generalized and anyway most of the books had obviously been written by people who had no
idea that magic was real.
The third section, on the uses of plants, was much vaster, but here Frau Beck was more in her element and was able to weed out unlikely candidates merely by reading the title in most cases. Down and around a corner she wandered, and unexpectedly found herself confronted with a closed door, that, upon rattling the handle, proved to be locked. She frowned, and glanced at the last shelf she had just been scanning more closely. In her memory from the manual, the section continued beyond this. Shrugging, she unlocked the door with yet another spell and found the door opened on a very small, cramped room with only a few shelves.
Examining the first few titles more closely, Frau Beck gasped aloud. The room contained grimoires—spell books—and recipe books such as a hedgewitch might have created to record her knowledge. Similar books had been in Frau Heller’s tiny library, just the sort of thing Frau Beck had been missing all along in this search.
Eagerly she reached for the first book and started to read.
Each subsequent night for the next two weeks she returned, drinking in the knowledge. No doubt the librarians had each looked at this storehouse of odd formulas in puzzlement, but to a hedgewitch this little room was worth more than an Indian diamond mine. Her own recipe book bulged with her discoveries. Nothing that could help Herr Lindworm, alas, but interesting ideas and combinations that might be worth a try to see if they actually yielded the results they promised.
Her finger paused on the very last recipe in the book, which was perhaps the fifteenth tome she’d read since beginning the endeavor. What? That can’t be right, she thought.
She had never seen or heard of a spell like this one. It was so complicated and included some portions that were so strange that she read over it very carefully twice to make certain it had been created with a hedgewitch in mind.
Animal transformation magic, while a part of a trained hedgewitch’s arsenal, was a branch of their craft that was rarely used, for several reasons. Because of the risk of any spell cast in malice rebounding, few wanted to end up trapped as a mayfly or something equally unpleasant until they could fulfill whatever requirements they had set for such a curse. Very, very rarely, such spells were performed with the person’s full knowledge and permission. More often hedgewitches used them to transform themselves, though the spells were difficult and also carried the risk of becoming trapped. Most hedgewitch trainees once they reached a certain level of skill tried it at least once—the temptation to become a bird, or a fish, or some other creature, was a powerful one for a young person testing the limits of their power—and either transformed themselves back successfully or were rescued by their vigilant mentors. Frau Beck herself had been in the former category; her chosen trial form had been that of a cat. Once was usually enough to scratch the itch. Having senses not yours by birth was, as Frau Beck could attest from experience, at best disorienting and worst debilitating.
The Dragon & the Alpine Star Page 9
