The First Dragoneer (2016 Modernized Format Edition)

by M. R. Mathias

  Chapter Three

  The King’s Rangers combed the area around the carnage, but they never found Jade. They did find another dead troll over the ridge. There was a pinky-sized piece of broken dragon claw stuck in its wound. The young Ranger who had tried to hush Jenka’s mother had it drilled and put on a leather thong for her as an apology. She scoffed at him, but didn’t hesitate to put it in her pocket. It would fetch a pretty penny down in Three Forks in one of the hawker’s lots.

  Jenka played the wounded young boy as long as he could fake it, which was only about four days. He limped around and groaned a lot, but since the morning after they had dragged him home he had been feeling better than he ever had in his life. Because of his seemingly quick recovery, several of the rangers were buying potions from his mother now.

  One day, Jenka came in from helping the baker chop down a bothersome tree and found the small table he and his mother shared laden with meat and savory smelling vegetables. He thought that she had just decided to splurge until she turned from her iron pot and started swatting at him and urging him out to the trough to get cleaned up for dinner. It turned out that they were going to have guests at their table this night.

  It was only Master Kember and Lemmy who were going to dine with them, but they were as welcome in the modest, thatch-roofed hut as the king himself would have been. The old hunter had come to ask Amelia De Swasso’s permission to take Jenka to Three Forks, and then on to King’s Island, where they would spend a few weeks in an inn and attend the Solstice Festival, and hopefully get an audience with King Blanchard. He explained that Lemmy would be staying behind and would come by and take care of the heavy chores so she wouldn’t be inconvenienced too much by Jenka’s absence. He told her that Solman and Rikky were going with the group to compete in the contests. “We will be travelling in a well-armed group. It will be a safe and informative journey for Jenka, I assure you,” Master Kember finally finished.

  “I’ll let him go, Marwick Kember,” Jenka’s mother said harshly. “But don’t you tell me them roads is safe and all that. I know better. Don’t even try to pull the wool over my eyes or I’ll shrivel your stones with a hex. Them trolls are getting riled up `bout something, and there’ll be sneak-thieves and Outland bandits betwixt Three Forks and Outwal, and pirates once you’re out of the harbor at Port. I was born out on Freemans Reach and spent my middling years on King’s Island brewin’ potions for a Witch of Hazeltine. Any fool who thinks a journey across the frontier is going to be safe will pay their price. Now you tell that handy dimwit of yours to keep me stocked in cut wood, meat, and bear scat while Jenka’s away, or when you return I’ll…”

  And so it went until the table was cleared. Master Kember was happy to be on his way. He wasn’t used to being scolded and harped at and it showed plainly that his patience was worn completely through.

  During dinner, Lemmy seemed to fade into his own shadow and did a good job of staying unnoticed, but within minutes of the serving dishes being removed from the table, he had the horses ready to go.

  To Jenka, the prospect of the journey was more exciting than anything he could have ever imagined. The group was to leave at the end of the week on horses the King’s Rangers would provide. An escort made up of two green Foresters and one seasoned old Ranger named Herald, who Master Kember always spoke highly of, would ride with them to Three Forks. That would take about four days. From there they would hire a wagon and travel for another day with an armed caravan until they were on the other side of the Great Wall that separated Port and Mainsted from the wild, mainland frontier. In Port, they would board a ship and sail to King’s Island. Then there was the audience with the king, and the Solstice Festival to look forward to. It was all Jenka could do to keep still. His only regret was that Grondy wouldn’t get to go with them.

  The morning before the group was planning to leave, Jenka walked out to his best friend's farm to tell him goodbye. Grondy’s hand was healing nicely, but his father needed him on the farm. They had gotten a contract to grow hay and corn for some ranchers down in Three Forks. Grondy’s destiny, it turned out, wasn’t with the King’s Rangers. It was behind an ox and a thresher in one of the foothill’s golden valleys. Jenka didn’t want to taunt his friend with what he would be missing, so he held back with his description of the coming journey. Even so, Grondy confessed that he wanted to go more than anything. It was a sad parting, and Jenka spent a few long moments after he got down the lane from the growing farm studying the trees and wiping the dust from his eyes.

  Later that afternoon, a group of King’s Rangers came riding into Crag all bloody and raving about a kill. “We got that dragon!” they bragged. “Felled him way back in Calf Horn Valley.”

  They had come to fetch Master Kember and Lemmy, but when they stopped by Jenka’s hut to purchase some healing potions from his mother, they drew Jenka into it, too. He was lucky that Master Kember waved him over and handed him the reins of the horse intended for Lemmy. Lemmy was nowhere to be seen, and Jenka was too worried that the rangers had just killed Jade to care about anything else. He mounted the offered animal and followed Master Kember and the rangers out of Crag and up into the hills. They rode until dark, then the rangers lit torches for them to see by, and they rode some more. Jenka figured they were already deeper into the foothills than he had ever been before.

  The group came out from under the sparse trees and topped a ridge overlooking an open, starlit valley. Off to one side of the open space, along what appeared to be a washed-out stream bed, there was a cluster of softly glowing yellow flowers. The petals were bigger than any Jenka had ever seen before, almost as big as bed sheets. It would have been quite beautiful had there not been the long, broken-winged body of a small dragon lying sprawled across the earth nearby.

  Jenka’s heart was thudding in his chest and the lump in his throat was the size of a gourd melon. The dragon was the right size to be Jade, but Jenka wasn’t close enough yet to be able to tell for certain. As they drew nearer, the dragon's scales began to shimmer a deep, greenish color. Jenka’s chest clenched with sadness, but then Captain Brody stepped up out of nowhere and quickly said, “Hurry! Close your eyes until after the flash.”

  “Whimzatta,” a faint girlish voice spoke with a tongue-tangling inflection. Suddenly, a sphere of stark, white light the size of a man’s head hovered in the air a dozen feet above the dragon’s twisted corpse. The air became full of humming, popping static and took on the clean smell of the sky right after a lightning storm. Several of the rangers shied away from the orb as if it were contagious. The dainty, hooded figure underneath the magical globe seemed to think that was funny.

  This was the first time Jenka had ever seen anyone use High Magic, and it was a little bit disconcerting. He had never seen one of the secretive druids that the rangers sometimes spoke of either. The Order of Dou supposedly had a monastery or a temple somewhere deep in the mountains. Some folks said they were elvish, but Jenka wasn’t sure he believed that. Due to their common interest of the forest, the druids sometimes helped the rangers, but they had no sworn allegiance to King Blanchard or the kingdom.

  Jenka cringed when he saw a pale, tattoo-lined feminine face peering out from under the hood directly at him. The druida’s gaze cut right through him, and he felt his scalp tingling as if his hair were standing on end.

  “Is that the one?” Master Kember asked. He put his hand on Jenka’s shoulder, breaking the spell he had fallen under. “It’s still got both of its eyes.”

  Under the bright magical light, Jenka saw that the dead dragon’s scales were the color of a deep, blackish-blue bruise, not green. He knew instantly that it wasn’t Jade. He was surprised at how relieved he felt. He hadn’t expected to be so worried about a creature that he had only spoken to once. Sure they had saved each other’s lives, but the truth of it was they were supposed to be natural enemies. Nevertheless, he was glad that it wasn’t his friend lying dead in the glade.

  “Maybe I missed?�
�� he shrugged. “It’s almost black.”

  The druida’s magical light suddenly disappeared. In the momentary blindness everyone experienced while their eyes adjusted to the darkness, she moved impossibly fast and slid up close to Jenka’s side.

  “Liar,” she almost purred the word into his ear, causing his blood to tingle with both fear and arousal at the same time. Her breath smelled of cinnamon and ginger, and she radiated a soft inviting heat like a woodstove.

  “Master Kember, I would like a word with our young troll-slayer if you please.” She gave a respectful head bow to punctuate her request.

  Master Kember’s expression showed the unease he felt at being this close to the eerie — yet exotically beautiful — tattooed girl. On the islands, and in Port and Mainsted, the practice of the arcane was more commonplace. There were witches and charm-makers on every corner, but out here in the frontier it was rare, and sometimes shunned. Jenka’s mother used magic of a sort, and he saw how people were afraid of her for it, but it was nothing like the High Magic that this druida had just been using. Master Kember gave Jenka’s shoulder a compassionate squeeze and hurried away, leaving Jenka and the druida alone.

  “It’s all right, Jenka De Swasso.,” Her voice was sweet and liquid, and it dripped into Jenka’s ears and flowed into him like honey. She looked surprisingly young; barely a woman. She had four thin, blue-green lines running diagonally across the bridge of her nose. There was an intricately-decorated circle on her right cheek, a similar square on her left, and on her forehead was a silvery triangle that pointed down at the tip of her nose, giving her brow a permanently sinister look. A few tendrils of snow white hair trailed out of her hood. Her eyes, though… Her eyes were pools of sparkling lavender that were so deep a person could drown in them.

  “My name is Zahrellion, but you can call me Zah,” she said. “Why did you lie about the dragon?”

  Jenka was answering before he could stop himself. “Because Jade saved me from a certain death at the hands of the trolls. I can never forget that.”

  “Jade? You know its name? You spoke with this wyrm?”

  “Yes I did, and I don’t care if you believe me or not. Just don’t tell—”

  She cut him off. “Oh, I believe you, Jenka.” Her eyes grew wide with a girlish excitement that she deftly quelled the second the emotion showed. Looking around to make sure no one was listening in on their conversation, she hooked her arm in Jenka’s and led him away from the dragon carcass. “I’ve talked to a dragon too, way up in the icy peaks. They choose to aid people every now and then when things come to a head. A time like that is at hand. Crystal told me that something evil has awakened in the hills. Most likely, you and Jade will meet again.” Her brows narrowed as the direction of the conversation took a sour turn. “We have a common enemy, dragons and men. The trolls don’t like the humans, and we are spreading and populating the frontier like field mice. King Blanchard won’t make the move, but he has planned it all out for his son. When Prince Richard takes the throne, the kingdom seat will shift to Mainsted, here on the mainland, and once that happens, there will be no hope for the trollkin.”

  The word trollkin was a slang term that included the little, gray-skinned goblins, the larger, black-skinned orc, and of course the trolls themselves. After hearing Jade call the trolls trellkin, he decided that maybe it wasn’t a slang term after all. Ogres, Jenka had deduced, were another sort of creature altogether.

  “They are starting to figure this out,” Zahrellion continued. “Already they’ve been forced into the higher reaches where the ogres and dragons reign. Soon there will be nowhere left for them to go. The dragons, on the other hand, can always nest out of man's reach. Only a very few of the most foolish wyrms get their selves killed. Those are usually the mudged, like this one. There are hundreds of dragons in the deep of the mountains, Jenka. Some of the wyrms are older than you can imagine.”

  Jenka stopped her and shook his head to clear it. He had lost her words in the feel of her dainty hand on his bicep, in the warmth of her smile, and in the conviction of her voice.

  “I’m telling you that we have to find a way to make King Blanchard or Prince Richard understand.” Her voice showed that she was becoming agitated, if not a little angry.

  “Understand what?” Jenka asked stupidly.

  She jerked her hand away, let out an exasperated girlish huff, and clenched her fists at her sides. “That the dragons want to help us when the trolls start their war! They’re in the hills gathering and planning as we speak.”

  “War?” Jenka didn’t understand. “Is it the Dragons or the Trolls who are in the hills planning right now?” Jenka had no idea what she was talking about. He was entranced by her very existence though, and couldn’t get his mind to focus on anything other than her beauty.

  She stared at him for a few long moments. “You’re daft,” she finally said. Her eyes were brimming over with tears of disappointment as she turned and stalked away.

  Jenka stood there, slack-jawed, staring at the darkness until Master Kember came over and started speaking to him. “Fargin women’ll twist your thinker till it pops.”

  “What?” Jenka asked.

  “Never mind, boy. What did she say to you?”

  “That the trolls are gonna start a war with us. That the dragons want to help us prevail, and that King Blanchard has to know about it so that we don’t keep killing wyrms.” Jenka couldn’t believe he had retained all of that, but ever since the beautiful druida had stalked away, Jenka had been thinking more clearly.

  “That’s nonsense.” Master Kember shook his head with disgust. “Fargin trolls can’t fight with any sort of form or muster. They end up fighting each other. By the hells, they’ll stop fighting to feed on the dead while you’re cutting them down. I’ve seen it. You didn’t tell her we were going to King’s Island, did you?”

  “No, sir,” Jenka answered. “Is the kingdom seat really going to move to Mainsted when Prince Richard takes the throne? I mean, I sort of understand the expansion and all, but where did we come from before the Dogma wrecked on Gull's Reach? No one ever talks about that much.”

  “That’s a good question.” The old hunter nodded. “There’s an age-old saying about it. It goes like this: Don’t worry about how you got here. You are here, and if you want to survive you have to keep doing everything that needs getting done.”

  “What does that mean?” Jenka shrugged.

  “It means that only a few historians even care where we came from, boy. A few dozen people survived a shipwreck that washed up on Gull's Reach. From that meager beginning, we populated all three islands and set up the strongholds on the mainland. Then we built that fargin wall to keep the wilderness out. Now we are trying to tame the land between the wall and the mountains so that we can grow more crops and build more cities and towns. We have achieved everything you know about. We’re not going back. We’ve been here two hundred twenty some-odd years. We are going to settle this frontier, and the trolls and dragons can be damned if they oppose it.” He let out a tired sigh and changed the subject. “We’ll have to postpone our journey for one more day. It’ll be dawn by the time we get back to Crag.”

  Jenka was only mildly disappointed by the news of the delay. He was busy pondering Zah’s beauty and what she had told him. The ride home was wrought with anxiety and excitement. Several times he started to ask Master Kember a question but caught himself. The idea that Zah might be right, that the trolls would defend their homeland, couldn’t be purged from his mind.

  He fell asleep back in his mother's hut as the sun was just starting to paint the horizon, and he dreamed he was flying high in the sky on the back of an emerald-scaled dragon. They flew across the oceans, over mountains, deserts and plains, until they found the motherland. It was crowded and noisy, and a haze of filthy air hung over the people like a cloud. There were no forests or fields, and the river that turned slowly through it all was clogged and thick with muck. Even the sea around the la
nd was black and shimmering with an oily sheen. There were factories, and shops, and buildings, and so many people that Jenka couldn’t stand it.

  Jenka wasn’t befuddled with Zah’s beauty when he woke up late the next day. He was contemplative and distant. He could imagine Crag a hundred years from now, all crowded and busy, and he wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of it. He finally forced all the negativity from his mind, like he sometimes did when he was hunting, and was decidedly the better for it.

  Beyond being as tired as he could remember, he was also beside himself with a giddy, childish glee. He was about to go on a grand adventure and, after being invited with the King’s Rangers last night, he felt he would make Forester this year for sure. He had just decided that things couldn’t possibly get any better, when he learned that beautiful Zahrellion and another of the Druids of Dou were going to be traveling to King’s Island with them. After hearing that news, Jenka spent the rest of the evening floating around as if he were on a cloud.

  Master Kember was none too pleased about the unwanted additions to his group, but he kept his opinions mostly to himself. Captain Brody had asked him, and ordered the King’s Ranger named Herald, to escort the druids as a personal favor. He also asked that Master Kember help them gain King Blanchard’s ear. Master Kember didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all, but he was willing to do it for the captain. Crippled or not, he was still a King’s Ranger at heart.

  Jenka said goodbye to his mother early in the morning, and promised to deliver a written message to her former employer on King’s Island. Visiting a true Witch of Hazeltine wasn’t one of the things Jenka had planned to do, but he loved his mother and couldn’t possibly consider refusing her simple request. After those tears were dried, he went and found Solman and Rikky at the stables. They both had their long hair chopped at the shoulders like Jenka’s, and they were doing what they could to help the two Foresters get the horses ready.

  As the sun was coming up and losing its battle to light the sky, the group of nine travelers gathered outside the stable in a light, dreary drizzle. They all had their hoods pulled up high on their heads and their cloaks fastened tightly. Not even the inclement weather could dampen their spirits though, especially Jenka’s. He had been assigned the pleasant duty of personal attendant to Zah and her older male companion for the journey.

  “Starting a journey is always such a thrilling feeling,” Master Kember said optimistically to his three students and the two young, uniformed Foresters. Jenka, Solman, and Rikky all cringed, expecting one of Master Kember’s windy proclamations. They were saved from a lengthy discourse on the beginning of journeys by the grizzled old King’s Ranger, Herald. He harrumphed loudly over Master Kember’s voice, spat a wad of brown phlegm from a slit in his dark tangle-shrub of a beard, and snorted. “It’s just the possibility that we might not ever make it back home that makes it thrilling, Marwick. Now let’s get this cavalcade moving before the buzzards fly down and eat us where we sit.”

  With that, they started out of Crag moving south toward Three Forks.