The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  Praise for the novels of Jan Siegel

  The Dragon Charmer

  “Magical… The Dragon Charmer has a poignant, bittersweet tone that Ms. Siegel employs to excellent use in her machinations between present-day Britain and the demon-filled realms just on the other side of reality. The narrative has an eerie, chilling quality, enhanced by the descriptions of horrible creatures heard but not seen.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Delightful… Engrossing… It’s a refreshing and welcome change to find someone producing skillful, entertaining contemporary fantasies.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  Prosperous Children

  “This book will not be forgotten… A lyrical, captivating first novel of mermaids, magic, lost worlds, and found souls that deserves the large and enthusiastic audience it is sure to find.”

  —TERRY BROOKS

  “An intriguing debut from a distinctive new voice … [Siegel] does a fine job of creating likable characters, setting the stage, and generating suspense.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A charming, powerfully imaginative work.”

  —CLIVE BARKER

  By Jan Siegel

  PROSPERO’S CHILDREN

  THE DRAGON CHARMER

  THE WITCH QUEEN

  Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all at Voyager for their support, their confidence in me, and their editorial endurance, most notably Jane Johnson, Lucas LoBlack, Kelly Edgson-Wright, and publicist Susan Ford, who went to such lengths to avoid working with me again that she actually had a baby. My special thanks to Chris Smith, whom I telephone whenever I’m bored, frustrated, or simply in need of instant communication, in the sure and certain knowledge that he will be at his desk and willing, if not happy, to talk to me. My gratitude and affection to you all.

  After Blake: DRAGON

  We dreamed a dream of fire made flesh

  we gave it wings to soar on high—

  an earthquake tread, and burning breath

  a thunderbolt that clove the sky—

  its belly seethed with ancient bile;

  its brain was forged in human guile

  and human strength with Vulcan’s art

  beat out the hammer of its heart.

  We dreamed a dream of hide and horn—

  the wonder of a thousand tales—

  we built from prehistoric bones—

  we armored it in iron scales

  and all our rage, ambition, greed

  reshaped our dream into our need

  with mortal hands to seize the fire—

  to more-than-mortal power aspire.

  And when the heav ’n threw down the sun and

  seared whole cities from the earth,

  when silence fell of endless death

  and wail of demons brought to birth

  when far above the shattered skies

  the angels hid their rainbow eyes—

  did we smile our work to see?

  Did Man, who made the gods, make Thee?

  Prologue

  Fernanda

  That night, she dreamed she was back in the city. It was not the first such dream: she had had many in the weeks since she left, some blurred, beyond the reach of memory, some clearer; but this was the most painfully vivid. She was standing on the mountainside wrapped in the warm southern dusk, in a blue garden musky with the ghosts of daytime flower scents. Here were the villas and palaces of the aristocracy, set among their terraced lawns and well-watered shrubberies. There was a house nearby: she could see the golden arch of door or window floating somewhere behind a filigree of netted stems. Its light drew her; and then she was close by, staring inside.

  There were three people in the room: a woman, a young man, and a girl. They were sitting close together, deep in talk. She knew them all—she knew them well, so well that it hurt to look at them—the youth with his averted profile, just as he had appeared the first time she saw him properly, and the woman with silver glints in her long hair, though she was not very old, and the girl with her back to the window. Herself. She wore the veil she had been given on the last day, hiding her cropped head, but the colors and patterns that had always seemed so dim and elusive poured down her back like some inscrutable liquid script, tinted in rainbows. It had the power of protection, she had been told. Her unspecified anguish crystallized into the horror of imminent doom; she saw herself marked out by the veil, designated for a future in which the others had no part. She tried to enter through the glassless window, but an invisible barrier held her back; she cried out—Take it off! Take off the veil!—but her voice made no sound. The whorls and sigils of the design detached themselves from the material and drifted toward her, swirling together into a maelstrom, and she was rushing into it, sucked down and down into deep water.

  And now the blue that engulfed her was the ultramarine of an undersea world. Great weeds arose in front of her, billowing like curtains in the currents of the wide ocean. They divided, and she passed through into a coral kingdom. But beyond the branching fans of white and scarlet and the groping tentacles of hungry flowerets she saw isolated pillars, roofless walls, broken towers. She floated over gaping rooms where tiny fish played at hide-and-seek with larger predators, and the spotted eel and giant octopus laired in cellar and well shaft. And ahead, in the shallows, the sun turned the water all to golden green, and she made out the gleaming spire of a minaret, the curve of a fractured dome. Then at last she found what she knew she had been seeking. He lay in a dim hollow beyond the reach of the sun, and stones weighted the rags of his clothing, and his dark hair moved like filmy weed in the current, and white shells covered his eyes. She lifted the stones that pinned him down, and removed the white shells, and kissed his cold, cold lips—a witch’s kiss, to break the spell—and his eyes opened, and gazed at her. The water receded like waves from a beach, and he was lying on an apricot shore under a sky of bronze, and his arms were reaching for her…

  The dream faded toward awakening, and, as always, there was a moment in between, a moment of unknowing, when the past lingered and the present was void, a waking to hope and the brightness of a new day. Then realization returned, and all that she had gained, and all that she had lost, rushed over her in a flood of suffering reborn, so she thought her spirit was too frail a thing to endure so much pain. And it was the same every day, every waking. She remembered that it was her birthday, her seventeenth. Tomorrow she would return to London, to school, to study, to the slow inexorable unrolling of her predictable life. She was a diligent student: she would take exams and go to university and succeed in a suitable career. And one day perhaps she would marry, because that was what you did, and have children, and live to be forty, fifty, ninety, until, unimaginable though it seemed, she was old and tired, and the dream came from which there was no awakening. A life sentence. Maybe eventually the acuteness of her loss would dull to an ache, and the routine of her daily existence would numb her feelings and deaden her heart; but in the morning of her youth she knew that this moment, this emptiness was relentless and forever. She had been told she had the Gift, setting her apart from other mortals that if she willed it she might live ageless and long—but that fantasy had gone with the city, if indeed it had ever been real. And why should she wish to lengthen the time of her suffering?

  When she got up she found the veil discarded on a chair the veil that was all she had left its patterns dimmed to shadows, its colors too subtle for the human eye. For a minute she held it, letting its airy substance slide through her fing
ers; then her grip tightened, and she pulled with sudden violence, trying to tear it apart, but the gossamer was too strong for her. She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cry, looked in vain for scissors, not knowing whether to be relieved or angry when none came to hand. Finally, she folded it up small she was always methodical—and thrust it into the back of a drawer, willing it to be gone with her dreams, back into the otherworld from whence it came.

  Downstairs there was melon for breakfast—her favorite—and presents from her father and brother. “What do you want to do for your birthday?” they asked.

  “Go back to London,” she said. “For good.”

  Part One

  Witchcraft

  I

  I have known many battles, many defeats. I have been a fugitive, hiding in the hollow hills, spinning the blood-magic only in the dark. The children of the north ruled my kingdom, and the Oldest Spirit hunted me with the Hounds of Arawn, and I fled from them riding on a giant owl, over the edge of being, out of the world, out of Time, to this place that was in the very beginning. Only the great birds come here, and a few other strays who crossed the boundary in the days when the barrier between worlds was thinner, and have never returned. But the witchkind may find the way, in desperation or need, and then there is no going back, and no going forward. So I dwell here, in the cave beneath the Tree, I and another who eluded persecution or senility, beyond the reach of the past. Awaiting a new future.

  This is the Ancient of Trees, older than history, older than memory the Tree of Life, whose branches uphold Middle-Earth and whose roots reach down into the deeps of the Underworld. And maybe once it grew in an orchard behind a high wall, and the apples of Good and Evil hung from its bough. No apples hang there now, but in due season it bears other fruit. The heads of the dead, which swell and ripen on their stems until the eyes open and the lips writhe, and sap drips from each truncated gorge. We can hear them muttering sometimes, louder than the wind. And then a storm will come and shake the Tree until they fall, pounding the earth like hail, and the wild hog will follow, rooting in the heaps with its tusks, glutting itself on windfalls, and the sound of its crunching carries even to the cave below. Perhaps apples fell there, once upon a time, but the wild hog does not notice the difference, or care. All who have done evil in their lives must hang a season on that Tree, or so they say; yet who among us has not done evil, some time or other? Tell me that!

  You may think this is all mere fancy, the delusions of a mind warped with age and power. Come walk with me then, under the Tree, and you will see the uneaten heads rotting on the ground, and the white grubs that crawl into each open ear and lay their eggs in the shelter of the skull, and the mouths that twitch and gape until the last of the brain has been nibbled away. I saw my sister once, hanging on a low branch. Oh, not my sister Sysselore—my sister in power, my sister in kind—I mean my blood-sister, my rival, my twin. Morgun. She ripened into beauty like a pale fruit, milky skinned, raven haired, but when her eyes opened they were cold, and bitterness dragged at her features. “You will hang here, too,” she said to me, “one day.” The heads often talk to you, whether they know you or not. I suppose talk is all they can manage. I saw another that I recognized, not so long ago. We had had great hopes of her once, but she would not listen. A famine devoured her from within. I remember she had bewitched her hair so that it grew unnaturally long, and it brushed against my brow like some clinging creeper. It was wet not with sap but with water, though we had had no rain, and her budding face, still only half-formed, had a waxy gleam like the faces of the drowned. I meant to pass by again when her eyes had opened, but I was watching the smoke to see what went on in the world, and it slipped my mind.

  Time is not, where we are. I may have spent centuries staring into the spellfire, seeing the tide of life sweeping by, but there are no years to measure here: only the slow unrelenting heartbeat of the Tree. Sysselore and I grate one another with words, recycling old arguments, great debates that have long degenerated into pettiness, sharp exchanges whose edges are blunted with use. We know the pattern of every dispute. She has grown thin with wear, a skeleton scantily clad in flesh; the skin that was formerly peach-golden is pallid and threaded with visible veins, a blue webbing over her arms and throat. When she sulks, as she often does, you can see the grinning lines of her skull mocking her tight mouth. She has come a long way from that enchanted island set in the sapphire seas of her youth. Syrcé they named her then, Seersay the Wise, since Wise is an epithet more courteous than others they might have chosen, and it is always prudent to flatter the Gifted. She used to turn men into pigs, by way of amusement.

  “Why pigs?” I asked her, listening to the wild hog grunting and snorting around the bole of the Tree.

  “Laziness,” she said. “That was their true nature, so it took very little effort.”

  She is worn thin while I have swollen with my stored-up powers like the queen of a termite mound. I save my Gift, hoarding it like misers’ gold, watching in the smoke for my time to come round again. We are two who must be three, the magic number, the coven number. Someday she will be there, the she for whom we wait, and we will steal her soul away and bind her to us, versing her in our ways, casting her in our mold, and then we will return, over the borderland into reality, and the long-lost kingdom of Logrèz will be mine at last.

  She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know how she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. “Fern” her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word “—Fern, are you listening to me?”

  “Yes. Sorry. What did you say?”

  “If you’d been listening, you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.”

  “I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The countryside is scenic—if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.”

  “I know. So why—?”

  “Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you do invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a drafty pub and drink champagne in the rain.”

  “Sounds like a song,” said Gaynor Mobberley. “Champagne in the rain.” And: “Why do you always do what Marcus wants?”

  “I’m going to marry him,” Fern retorted. “I want to please him. Naturally.”

  “If you were in love with him,” said Gaynor, “you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Maybe. Best friends have a special license to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.”

  “I like him,” Fern said after a long pause. “That’s much more important than love.”

  “I like him, too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.”

  “Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passe
d the danger point so you know the worst already.”

  “Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.”

  Fern gave a shivery laugh. “That’s like… oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.”

  “Cynic.”

  “No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.”

  “Do you remember that time in Wales?” said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. “Morwenna Rhys gave that party at her parents’ house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.”

  “Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again—you put on yourself—and then you know who you are.”

  Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. “Who’ll be there?” Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. “When we arrive, I mean.”

  “Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.”