Flight of the Dragon Kyn

by Susan Fletcher

  Soon the oars were thunking rhythmically, and a fine salt spray dampened my face and hair. Snow went flurrying past, but it was thin and did not stick. Kazan, the long-eyed youth, brought me a heap of blankets and skins. I nodded briefly, then turned away and busied myself arranging a skin-and-blanket nest. I felt his lingering presence; but when at last I looked up, he had gone.

  There was a boy, I saw, on board. He scurried about, feeding the horses, fetching brew for the men. From time to time I caught him eyeing me furtively. He couldn’t have been much more than eight winters old. He was dressed as one highborn—in a fine striped cloak of close-woven wool—yet it was dirty and wet and hung too long about his legs.

  As we drew near to the mouth of the fjord, the waves bulked larger. The oarsmen unfurled the sail, with much running and shouting and creaking of rope. The wind billowed out the canvas and pushed us through the strait; we heeled north into the open sea.

  Here there was no staying dry. The knarr pitched sharply; the horses stomped and blew. I crouched in the shelter of some casks, but the waves threw up sheets of spume, leaving horses, bales, and men all dripping.

  My red cloak had gone heavy and sodden; I peeled it off. Likewise, I removed the golden circlet, which had begun to pinch my forehead and make it ache. I wrapped it in the cloak and wedged it between two barrels. Then I piled the sheepskins over me to make a tent of sorts and huddled, shivering, inside.

  At last we put in for the night on the lee shore of an island. There was a long, shallow stretch of water leading to the land, and so the shore plank would not reach. I stood watching the men slosh through the water to shore, hesitating to submerge my fur-lined boots, when someone shouted, “Hey, Kazan! I think she wants you to carry her ashore!”

  “Why doesn’t she fly?” someone else said, and the hooting and laughter started up again. Hot-faced, I clambered over the side of the knarr and splashed through the shallows to land. I stared straight before me, ignoring the men, my ruined boots, and the sopping bottom half of my gown. But out of the corner of my eye I saw Kazan standing still in the water, looking steadily at me. Then someone cuffed him on the shoulder; he laughed, cuffed him back, then went to join his companions.

  I stood before the fire to dry myself, nursing my sore, battered limbs and seething in my heart—against these men, against the king and his lady-love, against my father and my mother and my brothers’ wives—against all who had conspired to put me in this wretched place.

  Still, the smells of cooking tempted me, and when one of the men offered me a bowl of fish stew, a horn of ale, and a hunk of bread, I ate. The bread was fine-grained and white, although stale. The stew had some unfamiliar seasoning in it, but it tasted well enough.

  I was tipping back the last of my ale when I heard footsteps beside me. It was the boy—Rath, I’d heard someone call him. In his hands was a screaming, struggling wind gull. I jumped to my feet, enraged that he would treat the poor bird thus, but he blocked my tirade with a torrent of words:

  “It was dragging its wing, Lady, I’m sure it’s broken or I would never have picked it up, and you can tell—can’t you see?—that it’s been starving. And the men, they say you know all about birds, you can call them clear down out of the sky when they’re flying, so I thought you might … maybe you would know what to do. Because it will die if we leave it here—it can’t hunt, something would eat it—and I truly think you should do something to save it!”

  He stood his ground, this stripling boy in draggled garb, seeming half defiant, half afraid. It was a moment before I recovered my voice. “Let me see it, then,” I said.

  I took the bird in one hand and spread the other over its back and wings. I could feel its heart pumping fast against my palm; I could sense its panic, a thin cold stream inside my chest. I spoke to it softly, stroking its soft back feathers with my thumb. Its heartbeat calmed. The gull folded its one good wing and calmly looked about.

  It was all-over gray—not white on the head and breast as male wind gulls are. A female. She looked thin—too thin. Her keel felt sharp as a knife; she was light as a handful of whiffle fluff. The boy had spoken true: She was starving. Carefully, I stretched out her wounded wing. I ran my fingers lightly along the line of the bone and felt for a break as best I could. I found no break, yet it was hard to be certain. Still, I had had some luck with a bird like this before, simply binding its wings for a time.

  “Can you bring me some strips of dry cloth?” I asked the boy. “And a piece of fresh fish?”

  Rath scooted away and returned soon with cloth and fish. I tried to recall how I had bound the other bird’s wings and, after fumbling a little, folded her two wings close to her body, then contrived to bind them in place by wrapping her about with the cloth. The gull refused to take the fish, so I prized her beak apart and slipped a morsel over her tongue down the back of her throat. When I let go of her beak, she swallowed.

  “That will hold her for now, I think,” I said, handing Rath the bird.

  He turned to go.

  “If you like, I can help you feed her in the morning,” I said.

  “Her? It’s a her?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll bring her, then,” the boy said. He turned to go again, and then stopped. “Thank you,” he said shyly. He backed off a few steps, then turned and scampered away.

  The men had put up a tent, a large one with carved oaken supports, for me alone. Here was royal treatment at last, yet I could not bring myself to be grateful.

  I had rather have slept in my bedcloset at home.

  I lay in the tent, wrapped in skins, listening to the hiss and rumble of the sea, so unlike the still, friendly lapping of the fjord waters at home. My mind wandered across the unfamiliar new landscape of my life—the journey in the knarr, Rath’s wind gull, the young man Kazan, the king’s mysterious and frightening summons. What did he want with me? And what was this oath he had made? At last, I let my thoughts touch the hurting places: my mother, my father, my home.

  I cried softly, for I wished none of these men to hear.

  We were two more days upon the sea. After the first, the waters calmed and the going was neither so wet nor so ache-making as it had been. The snow had stopped, but the wind was incessant and bit deeper as we drew north; no matter how many blankets I wrapped about myself, I never felt warm.

  This knarr was full of noise: hearth companions and crew all jumbled in together with horses and cargo—singing, fighting, stomping, cursing, eating. And yet there were moments of quiet, when the cliffs slipped past through the stone-gray sea, and only the creak of a rope, the clap of a wave, the cry of a distant eagle broke the hush.

  It was during these times that I worried through my plight. I had tried asking Rog about the king’s vow and his plans for me. But the prince had refused to answer, saying only that I would find out soon enough. Rath knew nothing—or claimed to know nothing—and I believed him. Perhaps the king wanted me to call down birds for him—but why I could not fathom. Surely not so that he could shoot them. Surely he would not stoop to that.

  But something Rog had said at the steading went through and through my mind. I believe my brother will be of a different mind once he sets eyes upon her. She’ll likely be home within a half-moon.

  So I would be of no use. Whether I could do what he wanted or no. I would show that I couldn’t, or refuse, or pretend not to know how.

  And I would be home—home!—within a half-moon.

  That first morning before we sailed, Rath fetched me his wind gull to feed. I taught him how to pry open the bird’s beak with the fingers of one hand and where to place the fish on her tongue. But soon there was no need to feed by force, for the gull succumbed to her hunger and ate freely from a fist—Rath’s or my own.

  She began to hop about on the hold; once she jumped onto a barrel and was nearly washed overboard when a wave broadsided the knarr. I devised for Rath a sling carrier of sorts out of a horse’s feeding bag. He looked odd, going about his
errands with a wind gull poking her head out the top of the bag and glaring at all she saw.

  The boy had lost all shyness of me, and, in between running to feed the horses or to fetch bread and ale for the men, he sought me out. We huddled in the lee of barrels and crates, sheltering from the wind, feeling the heave and shudder of the sea-breast beneath us, and he told me of his life. Rath’s father, a prosperous steader, had been killed five winters before when Ulian raiders burned his lands. Rath and his mother had escaped to the king’s steading, where his mother became a favorite of the king’s older sister, Gudjen. But his mother had been taken with the fever and died two years since. As Rath had no other kin, the king’s sister had seen to his care. “Some call her a witch,” Rath said, “and she is harsh, at times. And strict.” He made a face. “She is ever strict. But sometimes I can win my way with her.”

  I asked him about Kazan, and he told me that the youth was a trader from the land of the Vos.

  Of the Vos. I had heard of the Voslanders. They lived east and south of here. Once a trader had come to our steading from that land, bringing honey and spices and vibrant-hued silks. “His ship fetched up on a rock in a storm,” Rath continued, “and so he has to winter over with us while it’s repaired. The king wants Kazan to build him a ship, too—Kazan’s is fleeter than any of the king’s knarrs, and it handles better, too—but Kazan says that would take overlong. He says it’s too cold here. He wants to be trading by spring.”

  “He seems … young to own a ship.”

  “He’s not yet twenty, I think,” Rath said. “His father was a trader, too. He’s been a ship rat since he was my age—or before.”

  “Oh,” I said. I thought for a moment and then, “Why did he come to fetch me?”

  Rath shrugged. “Who knows? Kazan … has been everywhere. Maybe he hates the idea that there might be one place left in the world that he hasn’t yet seen. Or maybe it was birds. Kazan trades in falcons and feathers, along with other things. Maybe he thought that you—”

  Falcons and feathers!

  Rath broke off, seeing the expression on my face.

  What could be more useful than a girl who could call birds down out of the sky so that he could snare them or kill them? I turned away from Rath, trying to hide the rage that choked off my words.

  I did not see much more of Kazan—he rode on the other knarr—except that every morning and evening when I waded from shore to knarr or knarr to shore the men stood around joking and hooting and calling out for Kazan to carry me.

  I ignored them all.

  Still, none of them plagued me otherwise nor caused me to be fearful. I was for the most part left alone.

  On the morning of the third day we tacked into a wide bay. The oarsmen furled the sail and began to row. I clambered up into the stem of the ship and faced the breeze, bracing myself against the sea’s roll. The bay bent and narrowed until I saw that it was a fjord, a wide-mouthed fjord, hemmed in on either side by rugged cliffs and scaurs that towered skyward. Waterfalls tangled against the rocks like strands of a giant’s hair.

  Farther on was a place where the cliffs seemed to have crumbled, and a smooth, rolling valley tumbled to the sea. As we drew near, I saw nestled in the valley the turfed roofs of the largest steading I had ever seen.

  “It’s the king’s steading,” said Rath, coming to stand by me. “Or one of them. He has many. But this is northernmost—nearest the dragonlands—and he’s been here since the spring.”

  Dragonlands. My gaze drifted beyond the valley to where white, jagged mountains massed against the sky. This could have nothing to do with that tale they told about me, of when I was small….

  No. It could not.

  I put away the thought and turned to survey this steading. The wind whipped my hair about my face as Rath pointed out the buildings one by one—so many buildings that I could not without his help have fathomed the uses for them all. There were a high hall, a hearthroom house, a kitchenhouse, a weavinghouse, five courtyard storehouses, and a multitude of byres and sheds and barns. All were made in the way of the buildings on our steading, out of logs and thatched with turf.

  Yet unlike in my home, where folk had to wend up a long, steep path from fjord to steading, here the land was so flat that the homefields reached nearly to the wharf. And winter had come earlier here, for snow cloaked the steading and fields.

  A cluster of ships lay moored already: another king’s knarr with its red, furled sail, and some small fishing boats. A boat shed jutted out over the water.

  And now a crowd was gathering. Fishermen left their nets and flocked onto the wharf; women came away from the fish racks to join them. Folk emerged from courtyard and farmyard and field, thronged about by a horde of children and dogs. Rog called out commands to the oarsmen. The knarr glided up to the wharf, and several of the crew jumped out. There was a sudden confusion of shouts and barks and whinnies, a sharp lurch as the ship tilted shoreward, an overwhelming mingled odor of fish and tar and salt.

  Rog stepped out and began speaking with a richly garbed woman of about my mother’s age.

  “There’s Gudjen,” Rath said. “Here’s where I take my leave.” He hesitated, then, “Can I come see you tomorrow?” he asked. “Will you look to my bird?”

  I nodded. He slipped away through the commotion in the hold and leapt onto the wharf.

  Now Rog turned and, motioning for me to come near, held out his hand in courtly wise to help me from the knarr. As if I needed help. He lets me wade from knarr to shore these past days, and now he makes a show of gallantry. “Lady Kara,” he said, with a slight bow of his head. “Allow me to escort you—”

  “Rog, you’ll do no such thing,” Gudjen said. “Just look at her. What have you done with her that she is so bedraggled? Surely she did not set out so; her folk are not of overhigh blood, but they are not—”

  I drew myself up, indignant. Gudjen, a tall, hollow-cheeked matron with a beaklike nose, visibly checked herself. “Lady Kara,” she said in a somewhat milder tone, “I am Gudjen, sister to the king. You will come with me now and—”

  “She will not go with you,” Rog said. “I was sent to fetch her, and fetch her I will, all the way to the king.”

  “And a poor job you’ve done of it,” Gudjen said. “I gave you a scarlet cloak to garb her in before you put in to port. Where is it now? Is that the one I gave you?” She jabbed a jewel-encrusted finger at the cloak—sodden, dirty, and crumpled behind a cask.

  Rog reddened.

  “You were to keep it clean and give it to her only when you arrived here. At the very least it would have hidden that, that …” Gudjen’s eyes said clearer than words what she thought of my best wadmal gown. “And her circlet! What have you done with her circlet! Surely you have not lost it!”

  “No, I didn’t lose it,” Rog said. “It is only—”

  “It’s in here,” I said, ducking back into the knarr and hurriedly unwrapping the cloak from around the circlet. Gudjen rolled her eyes. I half expected the hearth companions to hoot and jeer at me, but they bustled about their business with eyes averted, suddenly quiet. “She was to wear those here,” Gudjen said to her brother. “That was why I gave them to you.” She sighed. “Come here, come here,” she said to me. I stepped back up onto the wharf. “Give them to me.” I handed her the circlet and the sodden cloak. Gudjen put the circlet upon my head and thrust the cloak at Rog. “You keep the cloak. It’s ruined.” She set off down the wharf, motioning me to follow.

  Rog grabbed my arm to stop me. “I am to take her to the king,” he said. “It is my errand.”

  Gudjen muttered something under her breath, shaking her head. “Rog, Rog, my brother. Think you truly that she is fit to be presented to the king as she now is?”

  Rog looked at me a moment and said nothing.

  “Think you that you are the one to bathe her and dress her and comb her hair?”

  Rog swallowed. “I could send a bondmaid to do that, and then—”

  Gudj
en glanced at me, said a single word: “Come.” I went.

  Chapter 3

  … to see the wide world in a dewdrop’s gleam or glimpse of the morrow in a wisp of steam.

  —LINES FROM OLD SPELL

  Never had I thought that I would be sorry to leave Rog and his men, but following Gudjen through the folk thronged near the wharf, I devoutly wished I were back on the knarr. The witch, Rath had said some called her. I could well believe it. Gudjen swerved neither right nor left through the crowd but trod straight down the middle of the wharf and up the muddy path to the courtyard, while folk one by one moved aside to let us by. They stared at our faces as we approached, and when I looked back, I saw their still-staring eyes fixed on me.

  The king’s sister, Gudjen was. I could see that she housewived the steading, for at her waist jangled a golden ring, laden with the household keys. Yet I would have thought that a king’s sister—a princess—would be doing something … ladylike. Spinning, perhaps. Or looking to the larder. Not sparring openly with the leader of the king’s hearth companions—even if he was her brother.

  At last we reached a small outbuilding at the edge of the courtyard. The bathhouse, I deemed. Gudjen opened the door; it was warm inside, and dark. In the light from the smokehole, I could make out a hearthpit with large, smooth stones ringed about it. The room seemed like to our bathhouse at home, but flagstones paved over the dirt floor, and an iron grating spanned the drain. Smoke twisted up, wafting a breath of burning peat. To one side of the stones stood a great many urns and pitchers, each nigh brimful with water.

  Gudjen handed me a heap of soft linen. “Put this on,” she said.