The Dragon Charmer

by Jan Siegel

  Around seven the house lapsed into a species of dumb lassitude. Mrs. Wicklow and the Dinsdales went home; Ragginbone had already gone, promising to return later. Abby was in the sitting room with Aunt Edie, who had the constitution of a navvy and was proving obdurate about having an early night. The phone still rang intermittently: they didn’t dare take it off the hook in case it was Robin or Marcus with news of Fern. Will went to look for Gaynor, locating her eventually in the tent. The tables were still immaculately laid, the flowers only just beginning to wilt. Everything was spotlessly pink. The wedding cake alone appeared somewhat the worse for wear: Yoda’s inroads on the foundations had caused the upper stories to collapse, and now it resembled a block of jerry-built flats in an earthquake zone. Gaynor was standing in the middle of the tent, surveying the wedding that wasn’t. Even the reflection from so much pink could not hide the whiteness of her face. “What are you doing here?” said Will.

  “Thinking.” Gaynor did not look at him. Her regard was fixed on the empty top table. “This was the only place I could be on my own. I keep wondering… if things could have been different. I mean, if I’d acted differently, or been more supportive, or”

  “No,” Will said shortly. “For God’s sake, don’t start feeling guilty. People who blame themselves for every single thing that happens really get on my tit.”

  “I don’t care who—or what—gets on your tit!” Gaynor flashed.

  “Good. You know what’s wrong with you? You’ve had a bad shock, very little sleep, and no food. No wonder you look as if you’re about to faint. Maggie’s left a stack of sandwiches in the kitchen for us, and there’s stuff in the cupboard that’s been there for years. This is the kind of house where tins of soup accumulate on upper shelves, fermenting quietly. Some of them should be quite mature by now.”

  Gaynor laughed weakly, but declined to eat. “I’m really not hungry.”

  “That’s just in your mind,” said Will. “Your body’s famished.”

  He took her back into the house, heated soup, teased her into eating a sandwich. After the first bite, she was a little shocked to discover she was hungry after all. “Don’t be silly,” Will adjured her. “Fern wouldn’t thank you for starving yourself. How could that help?”

  He carried more soup and sandwiches into the sitting room for Abby and Aunt Edie, although Gaynor had to forcibly discourage him from adding pounded-up sleeping pills to the mug prepared for the latter. (“I didn’t know you had these Borgia tendencies.”) After the chaos of the day, the evening dragged. Robin rang to say he was staying at the nursing home and Marcus had booked himself into the nearest hotel. No, there was no change in Fern’s condition. Aunt Edie was finally coaxed up to bed; a worn-out Abby followed shortly after.

  Ragginbone returned at ten-thirty, when Will and Gaynor were alone. Lougarry was with him.

  “What do you make of it?” said Will without preamble.

  The old man sighed. He had pushed back his hood and disheveled wisps of hair stood out from his head, making him look more like a scarecrow than ever. His coat steamed gently from the rain that had punctuated the afternoon. He smelled of wet cloth and leaf mold, and his face was sere and withered, like the residue of autumn. Somewhere among the lines and folds his eyes lurked under lowered lids, flickering into brightness in his rare upward glances. Only those eyes still seemed to hold some secret strength. For the rest, he looked ancient and frail, no longer a knotted oak but a twig that would snap at a touch, a leaf that would fall in the wind. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “We’ve been going over the area, Lougarry and I. There was little to find. I picked up this” He laid a long feather on the table, its pallor barred with dun ghost markings. “It might have come from the wing or tail of an owl. A very large owl. I think … I’m not sure what I think.” There was a further pause. Gaynor was too weary to ask questions; Will knew better. “It’s clear the Old Spirit was involved,” Ragginbone resumed. “Fern called him. Folly rashness—bravado who knows? He was here anyway. The specter that came for her must have been under his control. But the owl—the owl still puzzles me. That dream of yours” he nodded to Gaynor “tell me about it again.”

  She complied, trying to recollect details submerged in later events. “I was flying, like you do in dreams, only sitting on its back … I saw fields, and houses … That part was magical. And then everything became very rapid and muddled. It felt as if a lot of time went past. I was—somewhere dark, and there was a face floating in front of me …”

  “Describe it.”

  “Sort of pale and flabby … like a slug. The way a slug might look if it were human size and had human features and the personality of a psycho. The eyes were horrible: black and malevolent. It said—I can’t remember. Not the one… something like that. Then it went away, or I went away, I’m not sure. There was a nasty smell, too. Decayed vegetation. Dryness. Dampness.”

  “Which?” asked Will.

  “All of them.”

  “Not the one,” Ragginbone mused. “So perhaps … Fern was the one. But who”

  “Do you think it was more than just a dream?” Gaynor said.

  “What is a dream? The mind can move in other worlds; so can the spirit. Who knows where we go, when the body sleeps? Or when the body dies?”

  “Fern won’t die, will she?” said Will brusquely, betraying a child’s need for reassurance. It was the first time Gaynor had been conscious that she was older.

  “We all die,” said Ragginbone, “eventually. Still, she’s young and strong. I must see her. It is plain that she has gone, but until we know where it will be impossible to find her. I fear—” He stopped.

  “What do you fear?” Will demanded.

  “Many things. I have lived my life in fear; I am accustomed to it. Courage is a delusion of the young. Hold on to yours.”

  After that, he refused to venture more than cryptic utterances, and they said good night, watching him stride off into the gloom. “Where does he sleep?” asked Gaynor.

  “Out,” said Will. “Under the trees, under the stars, under the rain. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all. I’ve known him to spend days—weeks—sitting like a boulder on a hillside. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. Bugger him. Let’s have a drink.”

  It was Monday before they got to see Fern. Gaynor rang the museum where she worked and extended her holiday; Will seemed to be permanently on vacation. “That’s the point of a thesis,” he said. “You do nothing for a couple of years or so and then slog like hell for the last three months. I drop in on the college once in a while, read a book, paint. I’ve never really absorbed the work ethic.”

  “I’d noticed,” said Gaynor.

  Abby had driven Aunt Edie back to London; Robin stayed on. Marcus declined to move to Dale House—“There’s no fax”—conducting his life from hotel and nursing home by mobile and modem. On Sunday night he drove over to have supper with them, showing himself properly appreciative of Mrs. Wicklow’s cooking. He was a stocky, well-built man, his thickening waistline counterbalanced by breadth of shoulder, his dress of the sort usually labeled expensively casual (no tie and a vicuna coat). He had an aura of intense masculinity, the eyes of an intellectual, the mouth of a sensualist. He wore both his costly coat and his bald patch with a negligent air. Even Will admitted afterward that he was good company. But he shouldn’t be, thought Gaynor. The girl he was due to marry is lying in a coma from which she can’t be roused and he still sounds clever, well-informed, wryly amusing. It occurred to her that at no time during the dinner-table conversation had he revealed his deeper feelings, using witticism or generalization to fend off personal comment. After all, he was forty-six years old, a worldly-wise sophisticate who would never wear his broken heart on his sleeve. “But Fern’s twenty-eight,” she said to Ragginbone, driving to the nursing home on Monday afternoon. “She deserves to be loved madly, even on the surface. He should be weeping and wringing his hands—pacing the floor abandoning himself to despair. He shouldn’t be cool
and calm and collected and entertaining at dinner.”

  “Only the very young and the very old love madly,” sighed Ragginbone. “Enjoy it while you can. In old age love becomes embarrassing, often pathetic. The doter in his dotage. Don’t be too hard on Marcus Greig. He’s reached the years of caution: he loves carefully, grieves privately, and refuses to put either emotion on show. You shouldn’t condemn him for reticence.”

  “Anyway, I thought you liked him,” Will interpolated from the backseat.

  “I did,” said Gaynor. “I do. I just feel he’s picked the wrong time to make himself likeable.”

  They had arranged to visit Fern at an hour when she would be alone: Robin was at home catching up on sleep, Marcus was working in his hotel. She lay on her back in the high white bed, her head raised up on the pillows, her arms at her sides. The fold of the sheet across her breast was immaculate, the plumpness of the pillows undented save for the slight pressure of her skull. Electrodes attached to her chest monitored her heart rate: they could see the thin green line on screen, broken here and there into the hiccup of a pulse beat. “It’s very slow,” said Ragginbone. Transparent plastic tubes pumped essential nutrients into her at one end and removed waste products from the other. A video camera kept a mechanical eye on her. She looked shrunken, scarcely bigger than a child, and very fragile, a doll-like thing animated only by the machines to which she was wired. Life was fed through her automatically, its passage recorded, alarms poised to go off at any significant change. But there would be no change. They could see that. Her face was white, and very still. Ragginbone lifted an eyelid: her eyes were turned up so hardly any iris showed. The three of them found chairs and seated themselves on either side of the bed. Herself horribly distressed, Gaynor saw Will had shed his customary laid-back attitude: he was shaking and seemed close to tears. Tentatively she took his hand.

  “Is it my fault?” she said after a while, guilt returning. “Was there… something more… I should have done?”

  “No.” Ragginbone emerged briskly from some faraway place to which his thoughts had strayed. “When the Oldest One comes, there is nothing to be done. You showed great courage under difficult circumstances; somewhere, Someone takes note. Or so I have come to believe. As it is, we have no time for the indulgence of what-ifs and maybes. What matters is how we act now.”

  “Where is she?” asked Will, his voice sharpened with bitterness or pain. “She isn’t here.” He did not appear to notice how tightly his fingers gripped Gaynor’s.

  “Where indeed?” said Ragginbone. “That is the question. The tannasgeal drew her from her body, but it seems clear if Gaynor’s recollection of events is accurate—that the owl intervened. But who would send the owl? There are many evil creatures in the world, some less than human, some… more. Fern is the first in a long while to manifest the Gift so strongly. That might attract the attention of other Old Spirits: the Hag, the Hunter, the Child. Even She Who Sleeps. And there are too many among the Gifted who have turned to the cult of Self, to strange obsessions, ancient lusts: they, too, would be interested, though few remain who have not passed the Gate. I have been trying to remember…”

  “Fern was always afraid it would send her mad,” Will said. “Like Alison. Or Zohrâne.”

  “They made their own madness,” Ragginbone responded. “The Gift only gave them the power to exercise it.”

  “She’s never used it,” said Will. “Not since Atlantis.”

  “It would not take much to be noticed,” said Ragginbone. “If someone was watching.”

  Will frowned suddenly. “I know she lost her temper with Bradachin, when he first came to us. He said you could see the power, like lightning stabbing from her hand. But he wouldn’t—”

  “You cannot trust a malmorth. Remember Pegwillen.”

  “He’s different.” Will was decisive. “Stronger. He’s talked to me more than once about the honor of the old lairds—the McCrackens of Glen Cracken. He says they can trace their kinship to Cuchulain of Ulster. He sees their honor as his. I know he would never betray us.”

  “Maybe.” Ragginbone looked unconvinced. “I… advertised … for him; when he arrived, I checked his references. It is unusual for a house-goblin to change his residence, all but unthinkable for one to travel so far. The goblinkind are not like people: their behavior patterns do not alter. None of the werefolk are subject to evolution.”

  “He’s spent a lot of time in human company,” said Will. “He might have picked up a few bad habits.”

  “I believed him capable of loyalty,” Ragginbone conceded, “up to a point. But such elemental spirits have no moral fiber; their substance is too slight for it. Treachery comes easily to them: a little bribe, a little threat, and the thing is done. They care for humans as we care for pets. One dead goldfish can always be replaced by another.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Will doggedly. “You’re often wrong.”

  Ragginbone darted him a swift, sharp glance before returning to his contemplation of Fern. “It’s possible. It may have been … bad luck. The spellfire shows many things, if you know how to look. I have always guessed that was how Alimond first traced the key to Dale House, all those years ago. But the fire is wayward, like all magics; what you see is not always yours to choose. Still, the searching eye will always find what it seeks, in the end.”

  “If someone other than the Oldest Spirit found out about Fern and wants to use her,” Will said rather desperately, “you must have an idea who it is.”

  There was a silence while Ragginbone’s face seemed to fold in on itself, the furrows drawing together, closing over his features, until eyes and mouth were mere slits of concentration in a nest of woven lines. Gaynor imagined him reaching far and deep into the wells of memory, sorting through the jumbled experience of centuries, through moments of hope and joy and pain and sorrow, looking for the lost connection, the forgotten image. She wondered how it must feel to live through so many lifetimes, to store so much, to know so much, until the great weight of that knowledge sank without trace into the depths of the soul. When Ragginbone’s eyes reopened their expression was bleak. “As you remarked,” he said, “I am often wrong.” He would not venture any more on the subject, though Will pressed him. “At least her body is safe,” he pointed out. “I feared, at first, that he might have entered her, taken possession of her. She had called him, on territory with which he was familiar; the alcohol had numbed her brain; she had laid herself wide open to him. He would have made her an ambulant, his instrument, her spirit lost or trapped in some corner of her mind, aware but powerless. That would have given him both vengeance and control. Fortunately, her Gift—or some other factor protected her. Even her emptiness is barred to him.”

  “Fern would never let herself be possessed,” said Will. “With or without the Gift, she’s as strong as steel.”

  The sudden movement caught them all off guard. Discussion and argument were both forgotten; all their attention was focused on the patient. The motion had been very slight, a barely perceptible twitch of the right arm, perhaps nothing more than a muscular reflex. But in Fern’s inert condition even so tiny an indication of life was somehow shocking, as unnerving as a gesture from a corpse. “Look!” Will cried. “Her heart rate’s up.” On the monitor, the blips became more frequent. Will bent over her, calling her name, but her face remained blank and empty. It was Ragginbone, on her right, who first saw the cut. Her arm stiffened, shuddering, though the rest of her body stayed utterly limp. A thin line of red appeared on the underside, between elbow and wrist, fine and shallow as a paper cut. It was as if someone was drawing an invisible knife across her flesh. Ragginbone pinched the wound shut, demanding gauze, bandages, Elastoplast. “She mustn’t bleed!” he said, his tone so fierce that neither Will nor Gaynor questioned him. “Call a nurse!”

  The next half hour was an ordeal. Staff agreed that the injury was trivial; it was its origin that puzzled them. Initially Ragginbone was regarded with deep suspicion, an o
fficious ward nurse muttering: “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” but the videotape bore out the story related by all three witnesses. Robin arrived opportunely, and was taken aside by a senior doctor and asked if Fern had any history of what he described as “unusual psychosomatic phenomena.” Robin admitted reluctantly that some twelve years earlier there had been an incident that had been labeled at the time “post-traumatic amnesia,” but although he detailed everything he knew about it, and the doctor agreed there must be some connection, they were no further on. “The video camera is a very inadequate guardian,” Ragginbone said to Will. “One of us should be with her at all times. I fear she is in great danger. Persuade your father.” But Robin needed little persuasion. The weekend had turned from romance into tragedy and overnight his habitual expression of slight anxiety had evolved into one of chronic stress. No amount of care was excessive for his little Fernanda. The fact that Fern, although built on the small side, had never been petted and protected as her father implied, somehow made her present plight yet more pathetic and difficult to endure. She had bossed, bullied, and manipulated Robin from the time of her mother’s death, delegating only a few such duties to Abby over the years, and he could hardly bear to see her lying there, so deathly still, neither dead nor alive. Her motionless figure appeared somehow broken, defenseless, drained of all that was Fern.

  “You must let us take turns on watch,” Will said to him. “This could go on for some time, and you’re worn out already. As long as there’s one of us here … It would be awful if she were to wake and find only the nurses and a rack of machines.”

  “Awful,” Robin echoed automatically. The fact that she might never wake eclipsed such minor horrors.