In the Time of Dragon Moon

by Janet Lee Carey

  Uma, the queen’s flow is strong. She bleeds and groans with pain. Bring her a medicine to ease her cramps and something to help her sleep. Come immediately.

  Signed,

  Lady Olivia, Companion to Queen Adela, ruler of Wilde Island and the sister isle of Dragon’s Keep

  “Tell Lady Olivia I will come.”

  I shut the door and leaned against it. Queen Adela was giving me another chance to serve as her royal physician. How could I treat her tonight after she’d so ruthlessly burned Master Ridolphi?

  I did not wish her well.

  I wanted her dead.

  I opened Father’s Herbal to the Adan-duxma—physician’s creed—and read the warning halfway down. If you mix a remedy with hate in your heart, it will act like poison. Mix her remedies now and I would poison her.

  I read the other lines farther down. All people suffer. All people feel pain. Adans do not take sides in battle. Adans heal the wicked and the righteous alike.

  All people suffer. I saw how Queen Adela suffered, driven by child lust, by raw unanswered need. I saw the love she wanted from her husband and didn’t have, the madness that ruled her mind and isolated her from everyone. I saw how her wind mind scattered her thoughts and drove her into darkness. I’d listened when she’d grieved and raged, calling her God cruel for taking her only son from her, for giving her a stillborn daughter with a clawed foot, for not giving her another healthy child after years and years of trying. I stood a moment, hoping to feel my heart soften toward her, if just a little.

  Nothing.

  I took up the herbing knife, my palm remembering the sting of Jackrun’s anger when he’d slapped it into my hand.

  Light hurried footsteps came up the stairs. “Uma?” Bianca cried, tapping on the door.

  “Not now. I cannot see you now.”

  “You have to, please. You must!”

  When I slid the bolt aside, she flew straight into my arms, sobbing. “How could she do that to him? Every time I close my eyes I see him burning. I will never be able to sleep again.”

  We held each other. I cried with her, surprised I had any tears left when I’d already wrung my heart dry these past few hours.

  “My head hurts so much,” she said. “Please give me some evicta, Uma. I know I shouldn’t ask again. You told me not to.”

  Her wet tears cooled my neck. “I’m sorry Her Majesty made you stand so close. I’m sorry that you had to come at all.” I wiped my eyes, an idea forming. “I’m about to crush some evicta for the queen,” I said, “but I think I can spare some for you.”

  “Oh, thank you.” She hugged me again before she let me go, came and leaned against the table as I got out my mortar and pestle.

  I crushed the purple gyocana seeds in the mortar, the tiny black evicta, softly chanting the Euit names under my breath. I focused on curing Bianca’s pain and not the queen’s, hoping if I kept my mind on Bianca, whose presence warmed me, whose watchful eyes made me feel less alone, I could prepare the remedies without turning them to poison.

  Bianca licked the evicta-speckled honey as a kitten washes its paw, curtsied in gratitude, and kissed my hand as if I were a queen. When she left, I finished my preparations, filling the gooey centers of the sweetmeats with the black and purple powders, one for pain, one for sleep.

  On my way to the queen, I paused partway down the stairs, hearing voices on the second story, and peeked around the doorframe. Dim as it was, I could see King Arden holding Bianca in his arms. She moaned, resting her head on his chest.

  “I’m sorry you were made to watch, my dear,” King Arden said, stroking her hair. It shocked me to hear him repeating almost word for word the very thing I’d said to her upstairs.

  She wept softly, her satin gown crushed up against him. By all that was holy, what was she getting herself into? What would her mother, who was grooming her so carefully to marry someone of a high position, say if she knew?

  I breathed a little silent sigh when Bianca pulled away at last, thinking she had seen sense. She will curtsy to His Majesty now and they will part. It did not go that way. Instead King Arden offered her his arm. They walked together, heads bent close to each other, strolling not toward his bedchamber where his private guards would be waiting, but in the opposite direction.

  I had to follow. Taking a slow breath and whispering havuela—become—I stepped into the hall following them on silent feet as they rounded the next corner, hoping they wouldn’t stop at Bianca’s private room. They did.

  He whispered in her ear and kissed her softly on the mouth before he opened her door and drew her inside.

  • • •

  THE QUEEN WAS in her bed propped up against the pillows, a lambskin draped over her middle. The embroidered drapery surrounding her canopy bed showed a summer’s day outing with king and queen, knights and courtiers riding through wildflowers, feasting by a lake while minstrels played. Some long-ago time of ease and joy, or a time that never existed except in cloth and thread.

  Lady Olivia read, “That I might watch the splendid birds over the well watered sea—” She paused and lowered the poetry book as I stepped farther in.

  The queen glared at me when I curtsied. “What took you so long?”

  “Her Majesty is in great pain,” Lady Olivia added. She appeared proper as always, as if the pyre had never been lit.

  “Cramps,” the queen whispered as I brought the sweetmeats closer. “Ghosts. Get out,” she snarled suddenly, not at me but at Lady Olivia, who dropped the little book, curtsied as she retrieved it, and backed quickly from the room.

  We were alone. I held out the tray.

  “Where is my tonic?” asked Queen Adela.

  “I have added medicine to these sweetmeats for your cramp pain, Your Majesty.”

  She ate them both, moaning as she chewed. “Why are we made to suffer every month this way? God’s wrath is on all women.” She wiped the crumbs from her mouth and crossed herself almost as a second thought having spoken ill of her god. “I cannot sleep, Uma. Too many ghosts.”

  Ghosts of all the people you’ve killed. Hate flooded me again, thinking of Master Ridolfi. “The medicine will also help you sleep, Your Grace.”

  “Medicine,” she said, drawing the sound out slowly as if it were a foreign word. “You saw what will happen to you if you fail me.”

  I hate her. “I will not fail you, Your Majesty.”

  “You seem very sure of yourself.”

  I looked away. If the fey had hexed her, I had no chance at all. I would die. She moaned. I adjusted the lambskin across her middle. Women heated them near the fire and placed them skin side down to ease cramps: an old cure and a good one. It was one thing women in our tribe were allowed to do without an Adan. Such a small thing.

  Queen Adela petted the tiny curls in the wool. I thought of King Arden running his fingers through Bianca’s hair, of what they might be doing in her room even now, and swallowed.

  “A boy,” said Queen Adela. “You have to promise me a boy. An heir.” She looked up, the pupil of her living eye round and dark as an owl’s. I stared at her. She could not make me promise that.

  “Uma?” she said. “A boy child.”

  “Your Majesty, a boy to become Pendragon king, or a girl to become Pendragon queen.”

  “A boy. A king!”

  “A king,” I repeated just as loudly, promising nothing, only matching the intensity of her shout.

  She smiled at me. “Very good,” she said.

  • • •

  LADY OLIVIA LOOKED up from her book a few hours later when I entered her room. “How is she, Uma?”

  “The queen is asleep.” I had paused to listen outside Bianca’s door before heading down the hall to her mother’s room. I’d heard no sounds from within, but the king might still be in there. “The queen wants you to slide the trundle bed out
below hers so you can be near her tonight if she should wake in need of anything.”

  Lady Olivia sighed at the news. I didn’t look up in case she detected the lie. The queen had made no such demand. I wanted Lady Olivia back upstairs and out of the way as soon as possible so she would not run into King Arden exiting her daughter’s room. I kept my eyes on the crumpled dark green gown in the corner on the floor. Threads dangled like webs from the smudged fabric. She had torn off every decorative pearl that once adorned the bodice.

  Lady Olivia quietly closed her book. Whatever rage she’d taken out on the gown was long gone. “I will never wear that again,” she said.

  “A laundress could wash the ash—”

  “Never,” she repeated, standing and kicking it toward me as if it were a dead thing. “Take it if you want it. If you don’t, I’ll have it burned.”

  I had grown more accustomed to Bianca’s gowns. But I had only two. The gray one I wore now needed washing; still, I couldn’t seem to reach down to rescue the silken green dress that smelled strongly of Lady Olivia’s perfume and smoke. I felt like the very richness of her gown would bind me to her proper Englishness, the lacings tie me inside her stiff, emotionless prison. I would lose myself in it.

  “Thank you, no, my lady.”

  Upstairs, I was too exhausted to clean my worktable or put the mortar and pestle back in Father’s trunk. I dragged myself across the room, collapsed on my narrow bed, and wrapped myself in the Euit blanket Lady Tess gave me, missing Jackrun, wishing we hadn’t fought, wishing the world were different, that I was different, that no one depended upon me for their freedom and I could go with him.

  I thought the worst day I’d spent in Pendragon Castle since my father died was over. Nothing else could drag me any deeper down in despair than I already was.

  I was wrong.

  PART THREE

  Healing

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Vazan’s Den, Wilde Island

  Wolf Moon

  Late September 1210

  SOMEONE HAD BROKEN into the Adan’s trunk, stolen all the medicines meant for the queen. I didn’t discover it until the morning. The thief took everything but the wound kit I’d left in my herb basket. I nearly tripped running down the stairs to find Jackrun.

  “He rode out,” his pageboy said.

  I cornered the boy, nearly pushing him against the wall. “When did he leave?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did he say when he’d be back?”

  The boy shrugged. “He doesn’t tell me nothing.”

  Herb basket on my back, I took the wound supplies, the Euit blanket, and father’s dragon belt, carrying the few precious things I still had left in my possession from my room. Trust no one, Jackrun said. I didn’t.

  You do not visit a red dragon in her den, but I was desperate. Thick fog rolled in from the sea as I headed out alone, shivering in my cloak, walking the edge of the cliffs. If this was September’s chill, what would winter be like here in the north? You won’t be here that long. One way or another, you won’t be here. The thought made me shiver even more. At the bottom of the long, crooked wooden stairs, I stopped to fill a leather sack with sand and grabbed a stick before continuing on. Tracing the bottom of the high cliffs, I paused now and again and sniffed the air below the caves up in the rocky wall. When I caught Vazan’s scent, I peeled off my slippers and started climbing up, catching tiny outcroppings with my fingers, finding a handhold here, a toehold there.

  The keys to Father’s trunk and Herbal clinked against the stone as I worked my way up. Useless to wear them now the Herbal was gone, the trunk empty. The small clinking sound scolded my ears. The noise must have also alerted Vazan. Either that or she caught my scent. A red scaly head poked out above. Silver eyes watched me struggling along the steep cliff with cool disinterest. If I slip, she will simply let me fall to teach me a lesson for daring to approach her private cave, I thought. But when I reached the mouth she moved her foreleg back enough for me to crawl inside.

  I blew on my freezing fingers, missing the warmer caves I’d known back home, then greeted her in Euit. “We are being in this place together.” I scooted far enough inside to reverence her, bowing with my hands on the stony cave floor, not touching her. She’d never allowed me that, though I wondered if her skin might be warm.

  “We are being in this place,” Vazan answered in kind, creeping backward to let me farther in while also blocking the way to the deeper recesses of her cave. Her sharp peppery odor stung my nose, and comingled with the ranker odor of rotting meat, which nearly overpowered me. Still, it worked both ways. I knew she would wash the walls with fire to remove my human smell from her den after I had gone. To lessen my offense, I kept as close to the mouth of the cave as I could without falling out.

  “I won’t stay long, Vazan. You have been courageous to remain here with me in my trouble.”

  “I am here to make sure the queen keeps her promise. The Pendragon soldiers have to go. We do not want the English so close to our mountain. If they stay long enough to overtake our hunting lands, they will lose the protection of our long-held treaty. They will meet our teeth, our claws, and our fire.” She roared a heated jet. I flattened myself against the wall as it flared out the mouth of her cave.

  Satisfied, she shook her head, her scales making soft crinkling sounds. She yawned. “Leave, Uma. I am sleeping now.”

  “I would not disturb your sleep, rivule, if—”

  “You came for thissss.” She reached back, filled her claw, and placed two green piles near my feet. My heart swelled as I fingered the pink root tendrils still clumped with earth, the hand-shaped bapeeta leaves with the precious dots of pollen on the undersides. She had gone to find it after all. “Tuma-doa—Thank you. I’m grateful, rivule.”

  Vazan flicked out her long tongue, ready for me to go.

  I steadied myself and cleared my throat. “I have bad news. I need more—”

  “Of that?” she said, pointing to the herbs with one of her talons. “I will not go after any more of it!”

  “No, this is enough bapeeta, tuma-doa. It’s—” I took a breath, afraid to admit what had happened. “I’ve been robbed, rivule. Someone came in last night while I was attending the queen. I was gone two hours. They used that time to break into the Adan’s trunk and take everything inside. The queen’s remedies are gone.” I’d gone to sleep not knowing the robbery had already taken place. If I had cleaned the table, put the mortar and pestle back in the trunk, I would have seen it was empty.

  “The fertility herbs to get her with child?”

  “Yes, even that.”

  “Then the army will stay in Devil’s Boot. These English will have won.” She flattened her ears against her head. “How could you leave the Adan’s medicines unguarded?”

  “There was no one but myself to guard them! The herbarium door bolts from the inside. I had no way to lock the door from the outside, and whoever stole the herbs broke the lock on Father’s trunk.”

  “You searched for them, of course. Where did you look?”

  I shifted on my feet. “Where would I search? I’m not allowed to scour private rooms. I cannot ask the king’s guard to do it. Tell them my herbs are missing and the queen might turn on me, burn me straightaway.”

  “Who would do thissss?”

  “Someone wants me to fail. Jackrun thought it might be the fey folk working against me, but we—”

  “Why would they work against you?”

  “To keep the queen infertile so Jackrun can inherit the throne.”

  “Prophecy,” she said, clicking her black talons on the stone floor. “Yessss.”

  “I plan to go on fighting, rivule.”

  “The herbs you need to win have been snatched,” she reminded. “You are declawed.”

  I tugged the herb basket from my back, pulled out the
leather sack, and poured a pile of sand on the cave floor.

  “What’s this, Uma?”

  “You were with us when Father’s Path Animal led him to the herbs to make the fertility cure, when he found the kea and when he sent me up the tree to pick huzana leaves from the vines.” I smoothed the sand out with my palm and used the stick to etch the thorny kea stems and shape the serrated leaves.

  “Why draw this on my floor?”

  “To remind you of what the plants look like.”

  “Why not show me in the Adan’s Herbal?”

  My hand froze mid-drawing. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that part.

  “Uma?”

  “It’s gone with everything else, rivule.”

  Vazan hissed. She enveloped me in so much smoke, I had to rush to the entrance, hang my head out and breathe. She could not feel this loss as acutely as I did. No one could. At the mouth of the cave I hugged my stomach, remembering the years I’d watched Father engrossed in his masterful book, sketching the outlines of each plant and listing their medicinal properties. His life’s work was in that Herbal. I thought it would always be near to study at my leisure. I thought I would have it forever.

  When the smoke cleared enough for me to come back inside, I faced her again. “We have to harvest the fertility herbs, Vazan. It must be done, but I cannot go myself. I cannot leave the queen.” She said nothing, just blinked at me as if I were an annoying rodent that had stumbled into her den. “You want the soldiers out of Devil’s Boot as much as I do, Vazan. We have to keep working toward that. Everyone is depending on us.”

  “Ussss? I wasn’t asked to cure this queen.”

  “I hope you will go south for us and pick the herbs we need, Vazan, for your clan and for mine.”