by Grace Draven
She stared up but saw nothing, only a blue emptiness broken by a tattered drift of clouds. Whatever had flown above them and sent the pony into a panic was gone or turned invisible by some arcane magic. Elsbeth waited while Tater shivered and sweated. Soon, the first bird calls resumed, and the fields came alive once more with sound.
A shadow of wings and the pressing weight of air. A dragon. A dragon had flown over them, low and fast. Elsbeth was certain of it, though she had seen nothing as it flew by except shadow on the pond’s surface. Magic. Surely it was. A beast so large would be a target for every spearman in the surrounding counties. It would employ a means to camouflage itself for protection. She took a deep breath and said a heartfelt prayer. By some divine grace, the dragon hadn’t noticed them, even when the pony squealed and shook the cart to its pins. That, or it simply wasn’t very hungry at the moment. She shivered.
Maldoza, rising ahead of her in its tapering majesty of sparkling rock, no longer held a strange beauty for Elsbeth. It was merely a haven for a monster. Her stomach soured at the thought. Only the memory of the mob at her door and her helpless grandfather wasting away in his sickbed kept her from leaping onto the cart seat and turning Tater homeward. Angus would have gone apoplectic if he knew of this mad plan she and Irena had hatched. Elsbeth adored her grandfather. He was worth any risk she’d take in order to protect and ultimately save him.
She patted the pony’s sweaty neck. “Come on, lass. Just a little farther and you’ll be safe and sheltered with Master Grayson.”
The rest of the journey to the cliffs’ base remained uneventful. Elsbeth kept the crossbow in her lap and watched the skies. She found Donal Grayson, flanked by a pair of sharp-eyed sheepdogs, waiting for her as she guided the cart to his door.
Short and bent by age and years of laboring in his fields, Donal was the last of the border farmers remaining on their homesteads. He’d resisted moving to Byderside once the dragon attacks started. “I’ll not give up my farm over some lizard planting his fat ass in the cliffs and eating a stray cow or sheep. This is my land, and I’m staying on it.”
The village elders had finally given up, calling him stubborn and stupid for not listening to reason. Donal paid them no mind, defying their dire predictions of becoming a dragon’s next meal. He worked his farm, planted his fields, and kept a close watch on his herds.
He helped Elsbeth from the cart and smiled at her from a lined face sun-cured to the patina of saddle leather. “Well, if it isn’t Angus’s granddaughter. What are you doing here at the ass-end of Byder County, Elsbeth?” He eyed her armor curiously.
Elsbeth hugged him. She liked Donal and always invited him to their house for a meal when he made a rare visit into Byderside. “Help me unhitch my pony, Master Donal, and I’ll tell you my news.”
She stayed only long enough to put Tater in one of Donal’s paddocks, unload her supplies from the cart and recount the events of the morning and previous night.
Donal scowled when she finished her tale. “Never could abide Malcolm Miller, or his da for that matter. I’d lay down a harvest’s worth of profit that Malcolm killed his wife.” He pointed a finger at her. “You be careful around him, Elsbeth. He’s a nasty piece of work.”
Elsbeth nodded and stayed silent when Donal continued. “I’d think Irena gone daft, but her idea has merit. I’ve seen a parade of knights and their horses riding to the cliffs and never returning. Sometimes the beastie leaves their swords in my field as payment for a sheep or two. You should see the ruby I pried out of one hilt.”
Her eyes rounded. “Wait. Are you saying you two bargain?”
The old farmer flashed her a black-toothed smile. “In our way. You’ll notice my fields aren’t scorched, my barn not burned. I’ll put a ewe or two out in my south pasture for him. The beastie takes ‘em, no trouble. And sometimes he drops a shiny stone at my door.”
Donal’s revelation stunned her. Even though she had agreed to Irena’s plan, it had been more out of desperation than faith. “Irena was right then.”
“Of course she’s right. The old girl knows a thing or two about dragons.”
She eyed Donal. “That’s what she said. How is it a Byderside elder knows so much about dragons?”
He gave her the same knowing look Irena had. “That’s her story to tell, lass. Now, let’s get you back on the road. I’ll show you a shortcut to the cliffs that’s also easier to climb, especially with you being on foot and all.”
Donal’s shortcut was a quicker way to the cliffs’ upper levels, but also up a path choked with a low-growing web of plains scrub vine sporting thorns the length of a man’s finger. Elsbeth crushed the vine under her boots, grateful for the armor and its protective scale. Without it, she’d be stripped bloody by the clawing plants.
Another hour of walking, and she cleared the last of the thorny flora. The path continued its spiral up the cliffs, steeper now but blessedly free of vines. The sun beat down on her, plastering the garb she wore under the armor to her skin. She stopped, panting from the heat. Too bad she didn’t bring a horse. Going by horseback might have been easier. She smiled and pulled a long swallow from one of her water flasks. Unless she rode a warhorse, they wouldn’t get far. The typical farm mount would bolt at the first scent of dragon and throw Elsbeth off the cliffs in the process.
A hawk glided in hunting flight through the endless blue above her. Elsbeth wondered if the field mice and shrews hid in their burrows, away from the raptor’s sharp eyes. Gods knew they had more sense than she if they did. She was like those mice: small and weak against a much larger, deadlier predator. “Nice, Elsbeth,” she muttered. “You haven’t the wits of a field mouse.”
She climbed higher, accompanied by suffocating heat and the droning chorus of cicadas. By the time the sun set, she was sticky with sweat and exhausted by the long trek. She had, however, made it to the middle face of the cliffs where the largest caves punched dark holes into sheer rock.
A stony outcropping split into a wedge shape jutted up from the parched ground, creating a shelter from the wind and a place to rest her back. The cicada song faded to silence as Elsbeth shrugged off her pack and gusted out a relieved sigh at the sudden lightness on her back and shoulders. If only she could shed the armor, but that would have to wait.
Dry brush and scrub vine had found its way to this patch of ground, and she gathered an armful to use as kindling. The small fire she built gave off comforting light and offered protection against nocturnal hunters smaller than dragons. She settled against the rock’s niche and reached for a flask. Her water was tepid and stale but felt good on her parched throat as she drank.
The fields below transformed from oceans of gold and green to seas of pewter as the moon rose higher and replaced the sun’s light with its own gentler rays. The cliffs cast a pointed crown of shadows against the backdrop of roads and the far candle-lit villages and towns. Haunted it might be, but Maldoza offered the most breathtaking and encompassing views of the countryside Elsbeth had ever seen. No wonder a dragon had chosen the cliffs as its eyrie.
Despite a night sky festooned in stars and clear of clouds, the air hung heavy and still, like the last breath before a storm’s onslaught. Elsbeth didn’t like the quiet. Even at night, things rustled and whispered in the fields and forests. But here, on the bleak paths cut into the cliffs, nothing moved. Even the fabled haints didn’t howl—a small mercy for which she was glad.
Irena had filled her ears with advice before she left Byderside. “There’s no sneaking up on the beast, Elsbeth. Walk as if you’re off to visit a friend, not steal from him. Sing, speak loudly, even play your fiddle. Dragons are great lovers of music, and it will see you long before you see it. Give it cause to wonder instead of attack.”
Elsbeth hoped she was right. Her nerves stretched taut beneath the unending silence. She’d take Irena’s words to heart. A little music would calm her and maybe draw the dragon out. She was here to bargain, not pilfer or kill. She prayed the creature wou
ld be more curious than hungry when it finally showed itself.
She pulled the fiddle case from her pack. Inside the case nestled her most treasured possession. Her father’s before it was hers, the fiddle was the only connection she had to her parents, dead these many years. Angus had taught her to play, just as he’d taught her to weave. Ever patient, ever encouraging, he’d smiled and hid his flinches when, as a novice of both skills, she snarled the threads on her loom and sawed her bow against the anguished strings.
The hush around her thickened, as if the cliffs themselves waited to hear her play. Elsbeth stood against the rock, tucked the fiddle under her chin, and ran the bow hairs once across the strings. They answered her summons with a plaintive call, the sweet notes drifting into the silence. The night sighed.
She paused. What to play? There were the old songs, tunes every fiddler learned at their teacher’s knee. They played them at weddings, funerals, solstices, and child blessings. She knew them by heart, could play them in her sleep, and had set villagers to dancing into the wee hours in spinning kaleidoscopes of colorful skirts and garlanded hair. Still, such lively music seemed out of place here, beneath Maldoza’s glimmering shadow and the wheel of stars above her.
She thought of Angus, slowly dying in a sickbed in Irena’s house. Her throat ached with unshed tears. No matter how much she might wish otherwise, her grandfather didn’t have long to live. Memories of his teaching her to play rose in her mind, the summers when he was the fiddler at the solstice celebrations in the barley fields, and she danced with the other village children in the bright sunlight. Elsbeth again set the bow to the strings.
“For Angus,” she said. “May your spirit live young all the days of the world, Atuk.”
The fiddle sprang to life at her touch, and she played while she wept silent tears. A tune of love and nostalgia, its mournful notes flooded the moonlit pathways. The flames of her campfire flickered in rhythm to the song, and Elsbeth closed her eyes, lost to the music and the bright images of her childhood.
The tune segued into another and then another, and her memories changed, turning once more to Alaric and that blissful summer nearly a decade earlier.
Despite her initial resistance, she’d fallen for him. He’d won her, not with florid compliments or boasts of great deeds, but with things more prosaic. After the first reluctant dinner invitation, Alaric had returned a half dozen times to eat with her and Angus.
Elsbeth was taciturn at first, content to let conversation between Angus and the bard flow around her while she served their meal. The fact he not only ate her food, but did so with gusto, astounded her and delighted Angus. He didn’t look like he was starving, and starvation was the only reason she could think of that might inspire someone to wolf down her cooking with such enthusiasm.
He was at ease in their humble home. Other, wealthier families had hosted him on numerous occasions, their houses far more gracious and sumptuous than Angus’s. Alaric, however, had sat with her grandfather at their beaten table, shared a smoke, told his fascinating tales, and listened, enraptured, as Elsbeth played her fiddle, looking as if he wished to be no other place but with them.
As much as she hated to admit it, he fascinated her. No idler content to find a shady spot and watch as others worked, he often volunteered his help and labored in the fields and on the threshing floors. Once, at a barn raising, a brawl almost broke out between the unmarried village women over who would sit near him at lunch. Elsbeth hadn’t joined in the fray, satisfied to admire him from afar.
She invited him for supper several times at Angus’s urgings. Alaric accepted immediately, though his smile was rueful.
“And you, Beth,” he said once. “Do you want me there?”
Elsbeth didn’t pretend coyness. She disliked it in others. “Yes,” she replied before walking away.
“You warm my heart with your eagerness, Beth,” he called after her in a voice filled with laughter.
And you frighten mine with your charm, storyteller, she thought darkly.
Their dinners had slowly transformed. Her food was still burned or undercooked. Alaric still had two or more helpings. She played her fiddle for him afterward, but he no longer shared a pipe with Angus. Instead, he escorted her around the village’s perimeter, making idle talk as they admired the summer moon.
The villagers, ever curious of their neighbors’ doings, soon talked of the bard’s courtship of Angus Weaver’s granddaughter. And it was a courtship of sorts. Evening chats soon turned to kissing in the concealing shadows of the copse of woods that butted up to the village. Tentative at first, she’d finally shed her reserve and returned Alaric’s desire with a passion long-hidden.
Elsbeth, on the cusp of spinsterhood by Ney standards, had experienced her share of kissing and more, but none like these. Alaric kissed her with his body and his soul, not just his mouth. He was generous with his affections but not overwhelming, taking only what she gave him.
“You are too good to be true,” she teased him one evening as they sat together on a flat rock bordering the shallow creek that gave the village its name. Elsbeth savored the warmth within the circle of his arms. His chest was a solid wall against her back, his heartbeat a faint and soothing lullaby.
“You mean I didn’t live down to your first assumptions.” His voice was somber, lacking any reciprocal teasing in its tones.
Elsbeth half turned so she could see his face. Shadow and moonlight chased each other across his features, casting them in high relief. He stared at her with eyes that drank the light.
“No,” she said and cringed. “You didn’t. I was wrong to judge like that and hostile to you when I had no reason to be.” She stroked his neck, the hollow of his throat. “I hope you’ll forgive me. I convicted you on the behavior of bards who came before you. They’re a faithless lot. You’re not like them.”
His mouth thinned to a grim line. “Yet I follow their path, Beth. I sit here with a village woman in my arms, one with no protector except an old man with signs of bone sickness.” Alaric slid a finger under her chin and tilted her face to him. “I won’t lie or give you pretty words dressed in ribbons or dipped in honey. You’ll have my honesty.” His breath caressed her cheeks as his fingertips stroked her throat. “I want you,” he whispered, the declaration as fervent as any prayer. “Want to make love to you, want to mount you here on this rock, feel your legs around me as I take you.”
All the air in her lungs vanished, and her heartbeat knocked a war drum’s rhythm against her breastbone. She stared at him, into his eyes, gray as a rainy day.
His harsh expression relaxed into more rueful lines. “I’d tell you I loved you if I thought you’d believe me. But loving you won’t keep me here, no matter how much I wish it otherwise. I can only be what you first condemned me with in your eyes—a man wanting a woman so badly he can taste her, and no future to offer her. I will leave Ney-by-the-Water in two days.”
Elsbeth closed her eyes, despair, desire, anger and elation—all of them rushing through her at once. His words, seductive in their bare honesty, made her ache. She wanted those things too, wanted more than to recline here in his arms and trade kisses. Her elation over his oblique reference to loving her crumbled under the knowledge that she had only two more days with him.
The fates are laughing now, she thought. Elsbeth Weaver, so proud, so sure of her own heart and intelligence that she’d not be taken by the smooth charm of a handsome wanderer, had fallen deeply in love with one. Knowingly, willingly. And she didn’t regret it for a moment.
She turned fully in his arms so that she faced him on her knees. “You’re not like them,” she repeated. “You’ve seduced me with your honesty, not your lies.” She smiled when his eyes flared. “You can’t give me a future, but are you willing to give me two days?”
He didn’t return her smile, but his hand rode her back, pressing until she fell against him. The intensity in his voice made her shiver. “We can live a lifetime in two days, Beth.” He star
ed at her “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
She kissed him, savoring the curve of his lips on hers, the taste of his mouth, sweetened by the mulled wine she’d served with dinner. Alaric groaned and parted his lips, deepening the kiss. Elsbeth sucked on his tongue, passing hers along his teeth and the roof of his mouth. She wanted his taste, his scent, all of him. Her hips rocked, setting a slow grind against his stiff cock. She moaned into his mouth, and he echoed the sound.
A flurry of hands and half-muttered instructions accompanied the toss of clothing onto the rock and some even into the creek. Naked, Elsbeth held Alaric’s head close as he suckled her breast, his tongue laving her nipple in varied strokes before turning his attention to the other breast. She writhed in his lap and combed her fingers through his hair, loving the feel of silky locks on her bare skin.
She returned his caresses, coaxing out deep groans when she teased his small nipples with delicate kisses and the swipe of her tongue on their tips. His fingers dug into her hips when she nibbled the length of his collarbones and the strong column of his neck.
Alaric suddenly pulled away from her, and she whimpered at the loss of such closeness. “Beth,” he said in a tight voice. Sweat beaded his forehead. “Not slow this first time. I won’t last for slow. Later, I will savor you.” His hands gripped her hips, fingertips pressing into her buttocks. He ground against her, his cock nudging, seeking the slick entrance to her body.
Elsbeth couldn’t agree more. She slipped her hand between them and moaned her approval when her fingers wrapped around his shaft. He was hot, hard, and smooth to her touch. Trickles of semen smeared her fingers as she stroked the head of his cock.
