Dragon's Keep

by Janet Lee Carey

  “Speak and you shall sup,” said Lord Faul.

  “Please may I have my meal?” I said as sweetly as I could.

  “Say the word,” said Faul.

  “Word?”

  “In DragonTongue.”

  “Surely not!”

  “You will be using our language with the pips, so you must learn it, Briar.”

  “Aurug . . . ,” I growled. My stomach pitched. The only time I’d ever made a sister sound to this was when Marn had my head over a bowl for me to retch. I tried again. “Ruggullit . . .” Spittle dribbled down my chin.

  Hopeless. My teeth and tongue were not made for such sounds and I told Faul so. He pierced a trout with his talon and blew his fire on it. The cave filled with its rich smell. The sweetness of it taunted my nose.

  “Not fair!” I cried. “I’d never ask the simpkin Mouser to spout Latin, nor would I ask a dog to give a speech in French! It is beyond my mouth!”

  “Then so’s the auruggullittht,” said Faul.

  On my knees already I barked out the sounds till my throat was sore and my tongue was raw with rubbing on my teeth. After more struggle I vomited the word “Auruggullittht!” and was given a roasted fish.

  In the days ahead I dreaded Lord Faul’s language lessons. Restricting my speech with the pips to the twisting and growling of DragonTongue turned me to a fool. But Faul would have his pips trained up right, learning DragonTongue before other languages. In truth many of the words began somewhere in the gut as a belch does, and most were low of pitch. These sounds were well suited to dragon’s bellies, and the pips took to them as a ladle to the soup. But my belly had neither the roundness nor the breadth of my blue-scaled fellows and my soundings showed it.

  At home Mother and Father took pride in my agile tongue. I’d learned a goodly bit of Latin and mastered French with ease. Yet here, as Lord Faul spoke to us all in a row before the fire, I looked for all the world as dumb as a mushroom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hissstory

  AUTUMN BROUGHT POUNDING RAIN to Dragon’s Keep. I was expected to harvest even in the heavy weather, though Faul would not fly me there in the rain. So, wet and stinking as a cur, I hiked the hills to cut milkweed and thistle. When rain ceased and the air was damp and chill, I took Mother’s small round mirror from my cloak pocket, caught what ray of sun I could, and by reflection, lit myself a fire. When she’d first given it to me I’d held it up to her face, saying, “See the angel in the glass?”

  I did not look for an angel now, but there was fire to warm a ragged body. In the flames I’d cook the bit of raw meat Faul had given me. Some days fish, others fowl. After this spare meal I was back to harvesting.

  When Faul first found me near a little fire he huffed out smoke. “How did you make this?” I did not answer straight but said, “By fuel and heat.”

  “And a tinderbox,” he scoffed.

  I would protect Mother’s gift if I could. It was all I had of her here. “No tinderbox. I have none.” This was true enough.

  A strange look came to his eyes, and lowering his great head, he sniffed the fire as if to assure himself it was real.

  “So, Briar,” he said. “You have a fire in your belly.”

  I started. It was the selfsame thing his lady dragon said to me when first we met. Faul misread my surprise and took it to mean that like his pips, I too was gifted with fire. I should have disclaimed it, but liked his admiration.

  Near day’s end, if the piles were of good height, I stayed on to carve the boat. Even in the storm I’d stay, gutting the charred wood while lightning lit the devil’s banners in the sky. The slowness of the work angered me. How I longed for hammer and chisel! Even now, the boat was only a quarter done.

  The pips had long since grown out of the need to use the cave as their privy, so the hated chore of cleaning up the piss and scat was at an end. But they hungered all the time now and when I was not harvesting, Faul made me hunt and forage with his brood.

  Dark clouds hung over the greenwood, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Chawl snuffed around the tree roots. “Dig here for the truffles,” he said in DragonTongue.

  “If you help me,” I answered in English. “You have the sharper claws.”

  He batted my backside for not using proper speech, though not hard enough to harm me. I said it again in DragonTongue. It made no difference. Chawl roared and tumbled down the hill with Kadmi. They slapped each other’s tails, chanting the rhyme from Merlin’s prophecy I’d translated into DragonTongue and taught them. “Bright fire. Dragon’s fire. Broken sword. One black talon ends the war!” They bashed each other in earnest, finishing the game with words that twisted Merlin’s peace prediction. “Turn them into mincemeat! Bake them in the flame! Cut them up! Spit them out! Start the war again!”

  They rattled the words off well enough in DragonTongue, could spew the rhyme in English, and, more recently, in French. Lord Faul allowed some schooling in human tongues after they’d come to master their own, which they’d done at great speed already. I was proud of their progress. They were great mimics. No words or sounds troubled them, and no wonder. DragonTongue had to be the most difficult language ever devised; so all others came easily once the pips wrapped their slit tongues around that.

  I put my reed basket by the roots, a roughly woven thing I’d made myself. “Will no one help dig?”

  Eetha chased Ore around a tree. Truffles were a favorite with Lord Faul and I’d be blamed if we came up short. I knelt, unearthed a truffle, and threw it in my basket. How tired my bones were. Never did I treat my mother the way the pips treated me. Did I enslave her? Ignore her? Bat her behind? Order her about? Never!

  There was some pleasantness here digging up truffles. This earth was rich and damp and it clung to my fingers.

  Eetha brought Ore over to help, and we added more truffles to the basket. Some were the size of walnuts, but a few were as large as a man’s fist. Ore found the largest one, and her blue eyes went nearly round as she dug it out.

  “For Father,” she said.

  “He’ll like it best of all,” I answered.

  Eetha fell into a hush, lifting her head and listening to the breeze the way I’d seen Faul do sometimes. She breathed out a breeze sound, a kind of wind talk, then listened again. Of all the pips she had a way of sensing the future. How, I could not tell, but I’d learned to take notice when she spoke in creature tongues or answered the wind as she was doing now.

  “A hailstorm comes,” she said. I wiped my hands and stood. Dark clouds moved across the sky.

  “Are you sure?”

  Lightning flashed. Thunder. The hail fell so suddenly, Ore squealed and sidled up to me.

  “It’s all right, little one. The hail won’t hurt you.”

  Chawl bounded up the hill with Kadmi. Sliding to a halt in a spray of mud, they twitched their ears, opened their jaws, and roared out thunder. There seemed no sound the pips could not make, from the buzzing of a bee to thunderclaps. The pips’ imitation was so close that Ore put her head on my shoulder. She was the runt and not much bigger than I was, else I think she would have crawled under my skirts to hide just then.

  We waited out the storm under the pine boughs. Hailstones pelted the ground like a wealthy king emptying a treasure chest of pearls. A two-inch pile of hail covered the forest floor when the storm was over. The clouds retreated and the wind sighed in the trees.

  “How did you know the hail was coming?” I asked Eetha.

  She answered with a shrug.

  I envied her skill. In truth she had truer divining powers than Sir Magnus, who could never predict weather or tell the future with all his star charts, scattered bones, and books (though he claimed to do both).

  Chawl snorted then ran down the hail-covered path, calling, “Wild goat!”

  I knocked over the truffle basket leaping onto Kadmi’s back and we were off. The pips could not yet fly, but that didn’t keep them from the hunt.

  That night we suppe
d on roast goat, wild onions, and truffles. Faul beamed at his family as proud as any father. The pips ate heartily now, but they still wanted thistle milk. I was often left alone to harvest on the hill. I hated pulling thistles but the gouge in my boat grew deeper.

  Throughout autumn my chores seemed never ending. I was a servant sure, living in a cave, harvesting, cooking, and cleaning, and sleeping on a pile of moss and rushes. One rainy afternoon I returned exhausted with my thistle pile. No sooner was I in the cave than I was pushed outside again.

  “Gather more kindling,” ordered Faul.

  In the greenwood I piled up the branches, my back and arms aching. God’s bones! Would Faul never let me rest? Besides, the kindling was only an excuse to send me out. While I was away harvesting Lord Faul had been teaching the pips his dragon history. The lessons proclaimed the treachery of humans. I’d seen contempt in Chawl’s eyes when I’d entered the cave earlier in the midst of Faul’s litany. Even little Ore had looked angry so I knew it to be true.

  In the windswept forest I slipped through the mud in my threadbare shoes, cursing Faul and his kind through my chattering teeth. Weighted with wood, I hurried back to the lair and was about to duck inside when the shouts from within halted me.

  “. . . their deceit,” roared Faul in DragonTongue. “All humans are liars!”

  Why must he teach the pips to hate people so? I hid in the shadows at cave’s edge and peered inside. Smoke rose from the central fire. A cache of wood sat at Kadmi’s side—more proof kindling wasn’t needed. I would wait here where the drifting wood smoke covered my scent.

  “I tell you this,” said Faul. “In our great race, those of us who did not have their own inner fire died off in the age of ice. The human race would have frozen then. They would have been scoured from the face of the earth if the DragonLord hadn’t given them his fire.”

  Given his fire? No one had ever told me this. I held my tongue against my teeth, listening.

  “Then why did he give it?” asked Eetha, always the cleverest and most attentive to her lessons. Lord Faul raised his head and hissed, a sound I’d never heard from him before. I shuddered in my hiding place.

  “Pity!” spat the dragon. He eyed the pips one after the other, his slit pupils shining like hammered copper in the fire. I gripped the kindling tighter, rain pounding on my back.

  “No pelts to keep them warm. The cold was downing humankind. A clawful of deaths would have wiped them out forever. It was then a lone man staggered through the snow to the DragonLord. Entering the cave, he fell on his knees and begged the DragonLord for mercy.” Lord Faul whipped his tail. The cracking sound made me jump and nearly drop my kindling.

  “Mercy,” he growled. “And the DragonLord took pity on the man! And with the gift of fire blazing on a wooden staff, the man fought his way back through the snow, lit a fire in his cave, and lived!” spat Faul. “Lived, bred, thrived, and stole our land from us!”

  Here Lord Faul shouted fire to the roof. A canopy of flame spread out above the pips. And even from my hiding place, my face stung with the heat of it.

  “Then we’ll take it back!” roared Chawl.

  “Take it back!” roared Kadmi. “With wings and teeth and claws and fire!”

  “We’ll hold a Dragon Council and call for war!” shouted Eetha, leaping to a stand. I trembled at her fervor most of all, for Eetha had always been the kindest to me.

  I thought to leave and traipse back through the storm where I’d wait out their war cries. But Faul warned his pips.

  “Quit your shouting, pips, or the man-child will hear. Come summer when you’ve found your wings we’ll fly to meet the others.”

  “And begin the war!” called Chawl.

  “Not yet,” said Faul.

  “Why?” asked Kadmi.

  I peered inside and saw the dragon narrowing his golden eyes. “Now this secret must be kept from Briar.” The pips gathered closer, and Faul lowered his voice. I strained to hear from my hiding place.

  “There are too few of us left to fight. Man has killed our kind. Aside from us there may be only five or six.”

  “In the world?” cried Eetha.

  “In all the world,” said Faul.

  Little Ore let out a strange sound, which I took to be a sob.

  “Stop now!” roared Faul. “I’ve told you before. Tears will kill!” His roar was deafening, but he put his arm about Ore and said more quietly, “Turn it into anger, Ore. Lift your jaw and roar it out.” And so she roared blue fire to the ceiling as I’d seen her father and siblings do, but this was the first I’d seen her do it.

  “We must bow to Merlin’s vision and make peace or we’ll die out,” said Eetha.

  “Peace?” Faul batted Eetha across the cave. “Merlin’s vision was a lie! A dragon giving king and queen his talon? A king breaking his sword and laying it at a dragon’s feet? No one believed Merlin six hundred years ago when he told the Dragon-Lord he’d seen this written in the stars. And any dragon that believes such lies now should be clawed and thrashed until he finds his sense.” With that he bashed Chawl, who’d begun chanting, “Bright fire. Dragon’s fire—”

  “Lie down!” Faul roared, and all the pips curled up on the floor.

  “Make as if to sleep,” he said, “before the servant girl returns.”

  Servant girl! Rain rattled the pine trees across the river and I shivered in my place. But fear kept me leaning on the rock, and I waited in the cold outside the cave as long as I could bear. When at last the dragons’ breathing settled into sleep, I tiptoed in. Lord Faul opened one eye as I placed the kindling on the coals. And swift he had me in his claw.

  “Where were you, Briar? The pips grow cold!”

  “I . . . fell in the mud,” I sputtered. He shook me once and tossed me in the corner. I crawled, sore and freezing, to my moss pile. Flames licked the fresh wood. I curled as close to the fire as I could without completely crawling in and shivered as the steam rose from my wet cloak.

  Outside the dragons’ lair trees wrestled in the windstorm. I felt unsettled as the waving branches. I’d never heard the tale of dragons saving men with fire, but this news had not undone me as much as the idea that the dragons were aware of Merlin’s prophecy. Kye had spoken of it and his eyes were full of wonder as he told me the dream, yet even Kye’s own father wore a claw cut from the she-dragon to show his victory over her as men had done in the dragon wars. Knowing men did this, what dragon would cut off his own claw for the sake of peace? And even if a dragon made such a sacrifice, what king would toss his broken sword to a dragon’s feet when year on year the beasts had set fire to his villages and feasted on his countrymen? No, Lord Faul was right in this: The prophecy was an old wizard’s parting dream and nothing more.

  I turned on my side and listened to the wind mourn outside the cave. If reading the heavens was anything like translating Latin, I could forgive Merlin for misconstruing the stars. It may be the heavenly script is written in some unknown celestial tongue. Or God writes from right to left, and the wizard read the sky from left to right.

  Shivering, I watched the steam rising from my damp gown and worked to swallow down the dread rising up my throat. If Merlin’s prophecy was wrong concerning dragons, how had he misread my fate?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Strange Treasure

  THE WINTER I TURNED SEVENTEEN I came to think more and more of myself as Briar. Lord Faul had named me well, for I was more the leavings of a princess now than the stout of her. Knowing he planned to leave the isle when the pips were strong enough to fly made me work all the harder on my boat, but my hours in the hills were shortened. By fall’s end, I’d harvested the last of the wild milkweed and thistle.

  Faul had me cook the batches down to a bitter syrup. This, mixed with river water, was to be the pip’s winter drink. Soon snow covered my harvest hill and coated the woods all round till nothing but the waterfall would speak. Harvesting done, I thought myself in more danger than ever, but Faul gave me more t
asks, and I worked hard to prove my usefulness, hoping to delay my death.

  How strange the island seemed in winter, when a somber magic came over the world. Ice formed in great wing shapes along the edges of the waterfall, and early in the day, when the sun shone down, the ice glittered like great angel wings clinging to the black cliff rocks. I saw this one morning as I shivered on the shore and broke a hole in the ice to fill a dragon shell with water.

  Struggling under the water’s weight, I carried the shell to the cave. But before I set it on the floor, I tripped and broke the shell. Freezing water splashed across Chawl’s back. He leaped up with an angry hiss, for it’s an insult to wet a dragon. I stood, half drenched myself, and stammered, there being no words like sorry or forgive me in DragonTongue.

  Angry at the insult to his pip, Lord Faul stomped over and lifted his great foot to crush me. I cowered at the edge of the cave as Faul opened his black talons, his naked green foot larger than I was. Then with a tumble and a stumble Eetha and Kadmi rushed to me like scale-clad soldiers.

  “Spare her!” Eetha cried in DragonTongue. “She cannot help her blood! Mind her pretty part!”

  Kadmi bravely grabbed my arm and showed my talon to his father. Lord Faul spilled impassioned fire to the roof, then turned and quit the den. Beyond the booming of the waterfall I heard bellowing and crashing that was like the thunder. The roars and crashes made my flesh sweat, for here was Lord Faul’s anger fully exposed. I knew beyond doubt that without my claw and my caring for the pips, he would have had me between his teeth long before. And my screams and pleadings would have been to him a pleasure song.

  I sucked in a shuddering breath and picked up the broken shell as the pips gathered round to comfort their wet sibling. Then I poked my head outside and saw the dragon’s tail disappear behind the waterfall. Soon Faul was out again, treading through the snow with a large copper pot to replace the shell I’d broken. My heart quickened. Was this where he hid his treasure? I vanished back inside the cave before he caught me looking on.