They spoke like that for a long time. When the moon was perhaps half a fist higher in the sky and casting long silver bars through the trees, the voices faded. The Mother Superior pulled something from the folds of her robes, and the dragon closed its huge golden eyes and bowed.
She seemed to hold a star in her hand—a coruscant, scintillating fragment of light. It was impossible to see whether it was jewel or the wick of some torch unknown to me. She held it up—it drank in the moonlight and grew even brighter—and it appeared to rise of its own accord until the dragon caught it lightly in its mouth.
Two things happened as that strange exchange was completed: there came a sharp sound as though branches were indeed snapping under dragon-weight, and the central dragon bellowed in anger and surprise as cross-bow quarrels tore into its eye.
The knights had been moving unseen until they were at the very edges of the trees. I knew from his quick intake of breath that Baiden was still at my side. The other knights were rising and drawing their blades, which glinted like pieces of broken glass.
The dragons around them reared, and the trees were bowed again as in a windstorm. I saw Mother Superior shout something and raise her arms, but by then the knights were darting through the trees toward the central pair.
I felt Baiden stand, and I stood as well and gripped his arm.
“Is this what you thought would happen?” I hissed. “Is this what you brought me to see?”
“We weren’t sure. There were rumors, and we had orders to find out.” He looked toward the trees. “I have to help them.”
“You don’t even know what’s happening.”
The sound of screams came from below and what sounded like iron crashing on iron.
“I know what they are.” He pulled away. “That’s enough.” Then he was running.
“Claire!” I tried to shout. Something was tearing at the space between my throat and heart, and I forced myself to speak around its weight. “My name is Claire!”
By some trick of the light, when he turned back I could see his face clearly. His eyes were bright, and I swear he was laughing.
In another instant he was gone.
I waited for fire, but it never came. For several moments I was as frozen as though I was one of the trees myself, as though a part of me was questing backward through the season that had just passed as roots push through soil. I had not given him my name until it was too late for me to hear him speak it.
Then I was running among the trees, and Sister Mauro had grabbed me by the shoulders.
It was already over. I could not see the knights. The dragons waited again in the trees. At the center of the grove the silver mass of the dragon that has spoken with Mother Superior lay sprawled in the grass. It was suddenly clear why they roosted in the trees: its fallen mass carved huge furrows in the turf, and its breath withered the grass around it for yards.
It opened a ruined eye as I approached.
“Is this the girl who brought the men?”
Sister Mauro seemed about to speak, but another voice came from the darkness.
“No.”
It was Auden, his form pinned beneath one legs of the dragon. He spoke clearly and without labor, as though unaware that the moonlight showed his blood pooling black beneath the silver scales.
“We brought her, and we would have come with or without her. She revealed nothing.”
The dragon rumbled low.
“And what was it you brought her to see, Sir Knight?” Mother Superior asked.
“We feared you had dealings with our enemies.” Auden spoke low and unhurriedly. “There were tales of your abbey and what happened yearly on this evening. I would remind you that the enemies of our lords are your enemies as well, or should be.”
“We are no enemies of these,” the dragon rumbled again.
I looked around as it spoke. The trees were as I had seen them every day, though now the scene was complete, and I wondered that I had never noticed the emptiness before. I would not be able to see them in daylight again without seeing the clear blue absence of dragons. In and among the trunks the sisters stood motionless. In the immense, tangled universe of branches above, argent lantern-eyes waited and watched.
I think Auden had died before the dragon finished, for Mother Superior leaned over him, whispered a few words, and closed his eyes.
“I am sorry,” she said. “They were good men, and they served fair lords.”
The low, troubled rumble came again, but the dragon’s face remained impassive. “Do we have peace for another year?” it asked.
Mother Superior nodded. “Your time is not yet ended, though it grows short.”
“Where are the others?” I asked. I tried to push past Sister Mauro. “Where is Baiden?”
She hushed me, and one of the dragons called from above: “They are ours. They violated the trust.”
The supine dragon repeated his question, and Mother Superior repeated her answer. The words sounded rote, as though part of a ceremony that had been repeated here for centuries.
“We have been here long, daughter of flesh, but we tire.”
“We grant you the peace of the Absent King, whose land you hold in stead.”
“And we grant you the peace of heavy night,” the dragon answered again, “which lingers a time in mountains and forests.”
Mother Superior nodded, and the wings in the trees above extended. I felt beneath them the heavy night of which they spoke, deeper than the brittle blackness between moon and star. Then with a rush of wind that bent the branches of my oaks and sent me to my knees, they were gone.
Last to go was the silver beast who had crushed Auden. It pulled itself back into the tree with labor, leaving long welts on the thick bark, and groaned as it disappeared upward into the night.
“Auden will have made plans for his men in case he did not return,” Mauro said. “We should prepare.”
“How many were with you?” Mother Superior asked me.
I told her there had been five knights.
“There are four bodies here,” one of the sisters called. “Auden and three others.”
Something leapt up in my chest at those words.
“He must have fled to alert the others,” Mauro said, and just as suddenly what had leapt wilted like the grass around where the dragon had lain.
* * *
But when morning came, the knights were not holding the abbey’s walls. They had filtered out from the chapel with the sisters who had passed the night in vigil, and as the day progressed it became clear they were breaking camp. By evening their tents were down and they were marching in two long columns back the way they had come.
I was with the Mother Superior in her chambers, watching darkness come to the hills beyond the windows, when Mauro entered.
“Sir Baiden was not among the knights.” She spoke to the Mother Superior but cast a glance in my direction. “We took them the bodies as you asked and told them the truth: that they had been mauled by beasts.”
“And what did they say?”
“They said nothing. They asked no leave to track the creatures. They simply took the bodies and left. But the missing knight was not among them.”
The weight of years seemed to come to Mother Superior’s face like the shadows sweeping over the fields outside. “That they did not claim the right of the hunt means they know the nature of these deaths. And that they know this much means that Auden knew as much as we feared, even before last night.” She sighed. “It may not be possible to maintain the peace after this year.”
“Where is Baiden then?” I asked. “If he didn’t escape and his body wasn’t under the trees, what happened to him?”
“They violated the trust,” Mauro said.
“They took him, didn’t they? They killed the others, but they took him.”
The older women were silent.
“Where did they go?”
“The mountains,” Mauro finally said. “The dragons only come together on
ce a year for congress, and they spread far afield when it is done. But if there is any chance at all of finding him, it will be in the mountains.”
“There is no chance, daughter,” Mother Superior said. “It is not their nature to keep prisoners or barter for hostages. Your place is here with us.”
I looked toward the hills and beyond them, the mountains. They were fading to blue and purple as the sun fell, and at their feet my trees raised their branches in supplication.
* * *
Sister Mauro found me the next morning at the foot of the trees. I listened, but they were already falling back into the slumber in which they would pass the winter. I heard winds coming down from the mountains, and in the groaning of their wooden flesh I could still feel the dragons’ grips upon them.
“Tell me where they went,” I whispered. “Tell me what you know.”
I wore my heaviest cloak and the boots I used for work in the gardens, and I carried the very few possessions retained from before I had come to the abbey. Beneath one of the trees I found something else as well, which was now folded carefully in the small bag I carried: one of the knights’ cloaks. I did not know whose it may have been, but it smelled faintly of smoke and earth.
Mauro brought me another bag, this one a satchel filled with dried fruit, cheeses, and hard bread.
“If you cannot reach the passes before the snows come,” she told me, “return to the abbey. You know that you will still have a place with us.”
I nodded and thanked her.
Mauro smiled sadly. “Many serve the Absent King, and many keep the charges he gave the best they know. We keep the peace.”
I bit back questions. If I wanted to question—and if I felt I would be satisfied with the answers I would receive—then the place to remain would be here, behind the abbey’s walls.
“Wherever you go,” Mauro was saying, “listen to the trees, as I have taught you.”
I nodded. We embraced, and I walked out from under the oaks and northward across fields that were heavy with grain and the light of early morning. The road passed the fields at the edge of the abbey’s holdings, and I took it and followed it north, toward the mountains. All around me, the trees were changing.
Summer had ended.
Far away, the mountains grinned like grey teeth.
Copyright © 2013 Stephen Case
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Stephen Case is currently a graduate student in the program for the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, AE: the Canadian Science Fiction Review, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Shimmer,Ideomancer, and Ray Gun Revival. He lives with his wife and four children in Illinois. Visit his website for more.
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COVER ART
“The Frost Valley,” by Jorge Jacinto
Jorge Jacinto is a twenty-three year old digital artist from Portugal. His work has been featured as a workshop in ImagineFX magazine. View his concept art and commissions in his gallery at deviantArt.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
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