“I have done so all this winter.”
“But you are not ever … biddable,” he said. “I give you orders; you go your own way. How am I to trust you underfoot?”
“How will you trust me apart?”
Orrik sighed, then squinted at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps,” he said, “if you had some distraction …” A smile slowly spread across his face. “Kazan!” he shouted. “Approach!”
Kazan trotted across the snow toward us.
“Will you build me a ship or no?” Orrik demanded. “I need to know now!”
Kazan flicked a puzzled glance at me, then looked back at the king. “Ah, your grace—”
“Let me put it to you thus,” Orrik said. “If you will stay and build me a ship, Kara may bide at the steading, under my protection, for as long as she wills. If not, she must leave. So, Kazan. Perhaps I may yet get a ship out of you?”
Kazan turned deliberately from Orrik to me, gazed full into my eyes. I felt the warmth rise up and flood my face. I was smiling like a fool.
“Perhaps,” Kazan said slowly, not moving his eyes from my own, “perhaps you may.”
Gudjen went round the bathhouse lighting torches while I stripped off my clothes and pulled the bath tunic over my head. We had put in to the steading late the night before. I had stayed up even later, allowing Orrik to treat me as a legend amid the hubbub of questions and tidings. Gudjen had let me sleep far into the morning, for once. But the moment I had wakened she was there, poking her head between my bedcurtains. “Might we see,” she had asked, “what tells in the steam?”
A request, not an order.
Something new.
But I, too, wished to see.
Now Gudjen began pouring water over the hot stones. Steam hissed, billowed up into the rafters in seething coils. The air lay heavy in my lungs, swirled thick and white before me.
And then it began. Steam and smoke gathered above in a single, roiling mass. A figure began to form: huge and smoky-dark. And then … there was Byrn, regarding me from above.
She brought her massive head down beside me—so close, so clear that I saw myself mirrored on the surface of her eye. I blinked. The steam dragon blinked. And my mirror image turned, moved away from me. No. It was not my image, I saw, but the image of another—a girl I had never seen—one with a mass of yellow hair plaited long behind her back.
She seemed to walk into the dragon eye to where an old woman sat at a claywheel. There was something … known about this woman. Something about her eyes … The claywheel began to spin. The clay whirled, rose up, formed into a smooth, round object: an egg. Then all at once it cracked; sharp creature; sprang up out of it.
Dragons. Baby dragons.
They thinned, grew faint. And all was breaking up now—the woman, the girl, the dragon—dissolving into droplets of mist. But I thought I felt something, a voice shuddering through my bones:
“If a girl with green eyes calls, we will come.”
And Gudjen was raising the smokehole cover, setting the door ajar.
I breathed in the cool air, wiped away the sweat that trickled into my eyes.
A hatching.
The dragons would come back, I knew it. But the rest of it—the girl, the old woman, the clay—what was that?
“Did you,” Gudjen began, and for the first time I felt uncertainty in her voice, “understand—”
I was spared answering, for the door flew wide and a small figure came bursting through. It was Myrra, with Rath behind her. She hurtled into my arms, nearly knocking me down. I clasped her to me, laughing, then tucked her under one arm and hugged Rath with the other. I fussed over his bandaged shoulder—for too long, Myrra deemed. She tickled me to draw my notice. I swung her up over my head and down again, provoking gales of giggles.
It was then that I saw.
The old woman’s eyes … were Myrra’s eyes—wrinkled and old, but somehow the same.
“Kara?” Myrra asked, suddenly somber. “What’s amiss?”
“Nothing,” I said, then drew her and Rath to me again. I held them close, knowing there was yet more work to do, and that they would aid me in it.
Epilogue
—INSCRIPTION AT EDGE OF KRAGISH MAP
Here there be dragons.
Late in the day the ceremony begins, with a clash of swords on shields within the fortress. We are assembled on the highland without. The council bluff, as now they call it. There are many of us; folk voyage to the island of Rog from the far reaches of the kingdom each autumn, for reunions with old friends, for trade, for the spectacle.
“Time for you to play the legend again and ruin another good gown,” Kazan said irreverently this morning when we parted. I laugh softly now, remembering. Elve, our eldest daughter, looks questioningly up at me. I smile, put my arm around her. Then Bjerka, her sister, scoots in close, not wanting to be left out of a hug.
We are seated on a bench near the king and Signy and their three sons. Gudjen has taken firm control of the princes: Jorik, the heir, and Hakar, his younger brother. A nurse cares for the third, the infant, Urk.
Signy produced her sons forthwith, as was her duty, and then considered her obligation met. She spends her days making the grand castle in the south ever grander—keeping the masons and the smiths and the weavers of the region well employed.
Now the Sentinels, their shadows stretching long before them, file out from the fortress gate and onto the grounds. They wear the red capes and copper armbands of their order. Last of all come the three white-cloaked youths who will be sworn in this day.
Orrik mounts the dais to make his speech. It is a long one—it always is—interspersed with bursts of cheering. Urk, in his nurse’s arms, begins to fret. My daughters squirm and whisper. But the king’s elder sons, in Gudjen’s charge, sit still as stones.
Orrik tells of the dragon kyn’s flight, seven years past. His own part in the tale increases with each passing year, and the dragons grow more fierce. This pleases the folk. Ever Orrik pleases the folk.
My gaze drifts out over the sea, to where Skava led the dragons. Even on this, the clearest of days, I can see no land to the north. It is beyond the curve of the horizon, Kazan tells me whenever I ask.
I have sought for Skava in the autumn migrations each year, have sat through innumerable steam-workings to discover how she fared. But the steam never showed more of her, nor of the dragons.
She never returned.
I sigh. It is an old loss. I’m accustomed to it now. Still, memory tugs at me….
But my attention has lapsed, for now the crier calls, “Landerath!” and Rath steps to the fore. I catch the flash of something on his chest, the amulet Myrra gave him before she and Corwyn departed for their homeland. Rath is the last and youngest of the initiates, although, at fifteen, he is counted a man grown.
The youths recite their vows. They kneel before Orrik to receive armbands and cloaks.
And now Rath is forsworn. For in private he has vowed to help the dragons—not slay them—when they return for the hatching. He will join us in our plans, all of us who secretly prepare the way.
Rath passes before the cheering crowd, stopping briefly before me. He nods gravely. I nod back, knowing the price he has paid in forswearing himself, yet knowing also that the danger and loneliness of his chosen course matter little to him. I wonder if ever they will. I wonder if ever he will begrudge my drawing him into my schemes.
And now it is time for my part, the ceremonial calling of doves.
It is all staged, of course. I walk to the dais, glancing briefly up at the window in the tower where the doves are kept. The only difficulty is not sending my call too far, for then other birds would come and spoil the effect.
Orrik signals with a chopping motion.
I hold out my arms. I call: “Come.”
Silence, broken only by the roar of surf, the snap and crack of pennants in the wind. Then they explode from the tower window: a cloud of white doves, wings fluttering and creakin
g in the air, stray feathers drifting gently down like snow. The birds float down to alight upon me: my head, my shoulders, my arms. They hook their claws into my gown: a heavy, living mantle of doves.
Then … something else … I feel something….
I look sharply up and see her in the sky, swooping down toward me.
Startled, I let go of the doves with my mind. They scatter in panic before the falcon. She glides through them but does not pursue them; she is coming for me. She stalls, pitches up, alights with a thunk upon my wrist.
Skava.
I know her as I would know the face of one of my brothers.
She is older now, by seven years, and shows it. Her beak is cracked; her wing markings have faded to gray; a talon is missing from one foot. I wonder how that happened. I wonder what life she has lived. She turns, regards me with her keen black eyes; I feel the thin, cold ripple of her consciousness.
My heart is full.
“It’s time you came home,” I murmur. I hesitate to touch her yet; she might consider me presumptuous.
“Pssst!” Gudjen is hissing at me, gesturing furiously at the doves.
Reluctantly I drag my attention from Skava and set about calling the wayward birds. It is toilsome this time, for I must overcome their objections to a falcon on my fist. But doves are foolish and biddable. At last they light down on me again. A gull or two joins them, but I doubt that any save for Gudjen will object.
Then at another signal from the king, I release them. They sail away across the sea, an echo of when I sent the dragons to the northern land. But I know that Kazan is whistling for them in the knarr, with food to tempt them and empty crates for taking them home. They are obedient; I trained them well.
Skava stares after them but does not follow. Shyly, I move to scratch her feet—now bright yellowish-orange with age.
She fluffs her feathers, makes a burbling noise in her throat, and then begins to preen.
BOOKS BY SUSAN FLETCHER
Dragon’s Milk
The Stuttgart Nanny Mafia
Flight of the Dragon Kyn
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Susan Fletcher says: “While writing Dragon’s Milk, my first fantasy novel, I had to figure out many events that happened before the story began. This ‘back story’ began to haunt me. I decided to write it as another novel: this one.
“Still, much remained to be discovered. To find out about falcons, I enrolled in a raptor class at the zoo, during which I cleaned out the mews of various birds of prey and chopped up dead mice for them to eat. Later I watched two falconers at work and attempted —with no success—to tie a falconer’s knot with one hand. Still, most of the discovery took place in my imagination, where Kara came to life and the kyn of dragons took shape.”
Ms. Fletcher lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon, with her family and a black cat, Nimbus, who lay curled and thrumming on her lap as she wrote Flight of the Dragon Kyn.
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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition November 1997
Copyright © 1993 by Susan Fletcher
Aladdin Paperbacks
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All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Also available in a Atheneum Books for Young Readers edition.
The text of this book was set in Garamond #3.
Printed and bound in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Fletcher, Susan, 1951-
Flight of the Dragon Kyn / Susan Fletcher.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Jean Karl book.”
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Kara is summoned by King Orrik, who believes she has the power to call down the dragons that have been plundering his realm, and she is caught up in the fierce rivalry between Orrik and his jealous brother Rog.
[1. Fantasy. 2. Dragons—Fiction. 3. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction.] I. Title.
>
PZ7.F6356F1 1993
[Fic]—dc20 92-44787
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-81515-7 (Aladdin pbk.)
eISBN-13: 978-1-442-40706-0
ISBN-10: 0-689-81515-8 (Aladdin pbk.)
Flight of the Dragon Kyn Page 17
