“Skreck-ayar…” Paxala said dismissively, before suddenly hissing over our shoulder, behind us.
There was a sound of cracking branches, and out of the trees stepped a man with wiry grey and white hair and beard, with skin as tanned as old oak. He wore the studded leathers of a guard and in his hand he carried a short bow, but he held it in front of him uselessly at the sight of the gigantic Crimson Red dragon perched on the rock behind him.
“Uh…” the man said in a thick, guttural accent. “You have to work together to do what?” He squinted at me, and then at the dragon. I saw from his clothes that he must be some kind of scout, as he wore soft moccasin shoes, and hanging from his belt and around his back were a myriad of small pelts and pouches.
“We mean you no harm,” I said hurriedly.
“Of course you don’t.” the man growled. “The prince sent me looking for that big red there, to see if I could track down where the princess was keeping it. It turns out that it’s not the only thing that the princess has been keeping hidden, right?” He squinted at me suspiciously.
“You’re from Prince Lander?” I asked incredulously.
“’Course.” The tracker nodded, relaxing his bow and moving to open one of his pouches. “We’ve been tracking the movements of that there red all morning now. The prince is going to be glad of this, he wanted to invite the dragon to the keep, you see, instead of being out here all alone…” I watched as he pulled out a bright orange and yellow stretch of cloth, before tying it to the end of his bow and stepping out from under the tree cover, and waving it high. In answer, saw the flashes of color all along the tree line from what must be other scouts.
Oh no. I felt some trepidation, as I had known, obviously, that Paxala had revealed her existence to Prince Lander, but from the scout’s reaction it seemed that Char hadn’t told her father about me. How was the prince of the Northern Kingdom going to react to one of the Sons of Torvald skulking around his town?
I am Char’s friend. He will have to see that… I bit my lower lip and summoned a bit of courage. I am here for her, not for the prince.
“Now uh, you two aren’t going to be causing us any trouble, are you?” he said a little carefully, eyeing Paxala.
“Well, I imagine that she’ll just do whatever she wants to do, to be fair.” I nodded at Pax, which caused the scout to grimace. “But I’ll try to put in a good word for you, you know, in case she gets peckish.”
Paxala spat a tiny puff of flame into the air, as if to say that she would be very happy to eat anyone who tried to hurt her. The scout backed away, waiting for the others of his colleagues to arrive.
“Well, Pax.” I sighed under my breath. “It looks like you got your wish, and we’re going to the keep after all.”
“Look at the size of it!” I heard one of the townsfolk say as we walked through Lander’s town to the gates.
It? She’s not an it! I thought angrily, casting a scowl at the merchant, who didn’t notice, being much more interested in what the giant Crimson Red dragon was doing beside me. A ripple of gasps and awed voices followed us as villagers opened windows and doors to gaze on the dragon entering their town.
“Now, Paxala, these people don’t know about dragons,” I tried to tell her, as she stalked through the streets.
“We do,” said the scout ahead of us, “only the dragons that we all know about are the wild mountain ones, and none of them would ever get within a league of the Queen’s Keep without getting shot out of the sky…”
Paxala growled in response.
“It’s okay, Pax, he means that the wild dragons are like, well, they are a bit more like Zaxx. Violent and savage. As you have reason to know,” I pointed out, but the Crimson Red was already paying more attention to other things. Namely, the fish stall.
“No, Pax, wait…” I tried to say, just as there was a scream from the people around us as the Crimson Red suddenly launched herself at the fish stall, exploding wood and ripping the simple tarpaulin cover, but also covering herself with fresh river fish.
“Ah, sorry,” I said to the owner of the stall, who seemed to shrug in a bewildered way. “It’s really is a great compliment, that a dragon thinks the contents of your stall are worth eating,” I said, hoping Prince Lander had some means for compensating the fishmonger.
It took me a considerable amount of time to get the dragon to resume our procession through the town, during which time the streets filled with more people (many of whom made the sign to ward off bad luck, I saw). But eventually, we managed to get all of the way up to the Queen’s Keep, where a line of the prince’s guard stood on one side of the gate while on the other side was a line of warriors who looked a lot more like the scout. Char said that her mother’s people were wild mountain folk, I thought, noticing how they had rougher, homespun clothes as well as large animal pelts on their backs.
In the center stood the thin, rugged form of Prince Lander himself, wearing deep blue. I sank to my knee, but Paxala just cocked her head.
“Mighty dragon, my name is Prince Lander, ruler of the Northern Kingdom,” he said in a loud voice. “I welcome you to my home, and bid you to have everything you desire here!”
In response, the dragon just turned her head to one side, as if wondering what on earth the human was saying.
Not what, why, I thought, raising my head as a shadow crossed in front of me.
“Neill of Torvald, you, too, are welcome here,” the prince said with a brittle smile and much cooler tone, I noted.
“Thank you, my prince.” I nodded, rising at his gesture.
“Tell me, Neill, can you communicate with the dragon as well?” he asked me with bright eyes.
Immediately my stomach filled with ice. He wasn’t as scary or as threatening as Prince Vincent of the Middle Kingdom, but there was something here that I didn’t like. Something that reminded me of my brothers: harsh, and warlike (but not as loud or boisterous).
I shook my head. “No, sire,” I said. “But she sometimes listens to people…”
“I see.” The prince nodded. “Well, we have prepared a space for her on the very top of the keep, where there is room enough to land and to sleep and to sprawl or whatever else she might like to do. I have ordered wood and straw and sand and barrels of meat and water to be taken up there for her pleasure. Will that suffice, do you think?”
“You’d have better luck with fish,” said a voice from the gates behind, as emerging from the keep came a figure that I didn’t recognize, or hardly at all.
“Char?” I said in confusion, seeing not the young, light-haired girl who had always worn a utility belt under her black monks’ robes, but instead a young princess, dressed in a blue and purple short riding jacket, above a voluminous powder blue skirt that swelled out from her hips as if she were a giant mushroom. “Oh my gosh.” I tried to stop the grin from invading the lower part of my face (and failed, utterly).
“Don’t you dare laugh,” she hissed at me, striding forward to Paxala, who was making small leaping motions with her front feet before excitedly bumping the princess to the floor.
“Daughter?” The Prince of the North looked alarmed, but Char was laughing as she got up, her powder blue skirt now smudged with dirt as she caught a hold of the dragon’s wide snout and gave her a playful wrestle.
The dragon purred loudly, and that appeared to be that, as the dragon accepted where she was as comfortably as if she had always been here. Within a few moments, the Crimson Red had enough of the adoring (and frightened) crowd of onlookers, and jumped into the air to circle the keep once, before alighting high up there on the roof and disappearing from view. After a moment, I heard scraping and the distant sounds of chirrups and calls as she settled herself in.
“Marvelous,” Prince Lander was saying, looking up to the top of his keep with a look that could only be described as a gloat.
“Come on,” Char whispered at me, nodding that I was to follow her inside. “I’ll show you around,” she said heavily, an
d I knew what she meant--that we had to get on with why we were really here.
CHAPTER 16
OBLIGATIONS
Watching Neill try to navigate his way through my father’s court and the Queen’s Keep was like watching one of my father’s horses learn how to hold a knight for the first time. I had never been to the Eastern Marches of the Middle Kingdom, but I guessed now that they did not have the same finery or elaborate courts as the prince’s kingdoms did at all. Neill was skittish and wary of those around him, even of those courtiers who would suddenly appear, offering him wine of food.
“Why?” I heard him ask one of the courtiers on the first night that he was there. My father had decided to call a ‘dragon feast’ in honor of ‘his’ dragon, and of course every clan chief and captain of the guard had been invited.
“Because you might be thirsty, young sir?” I overheard the courtier say with a smirk.
“No, I understand why I might want to drink,” I heard Torvald say hotly, turning red as he must have felt embarrassed. “What I mean is, why are you offering me a drink? Can’t I get my own?”
“Ah, that is not uh, that is not how we do things here…” The courtier frowned, just as I waltzed in to rescue Neill from further upset.
“Neill!” I smiled, taking his arm and pulling him away. He gladly hurried with me across the marble checkerboard floor, pulling at the tight-fitting blue and red jacket that they had put him in.
“I still don’t know why I can’t wear my traveling clothes,” he grumbled. “They were much more comfortable – not that I’m not grateful to your father for the gift of course…” he said apologetically.
“Because you’re meeting most of the nobility of the north here,” I said in exasperation, even as I secretly shared his sentiments. My dresses had gotten more elaborate seams, and the fashion of the court itself had become closer to the Middle Kingdom decadence of Prince Vincent. This is how he wages war with us, by making our people want the things that he has, I thought, knowing that it was my mother’s voice that I was recalling.
“You see those over there, in the furs and the sturdier clothes?” I nodded to a gaggle of people who stood around the great hearth, quaffing wine, singing songs, or otherwise arguing about things. Torvald nodded.
“They’re representatives of my mother’s people. The mountain folk. There are loads of clans--literally hundreds--up in the mountains, but these are the ones allied to my father, and most of that is because he took my mother as his mistress,” I explained to him, before leading him around the grand hall.
The Grand Hall of the Queen’s Keep was only one of a few such halls, but this was the longest so most feasts happened here. It was also where my father had his throne, with two slightly smaller thrones on either side of him (one for Odette, my stepmother and the other for Galetta, my mother). The fact that the two women got on at all was a mystery to most, and Neill seemed no exception as he looked in alarm at the two ‘queens.’ Odette was thin like my father, but older, with hair that fell in dark curls around a pale face. Her frame was thin--nothing at all like my shorter, rounder, and thoroughly more pleasant mother, the red and white frizzy-haired Galette. The two women were engaged deep in conversation over the empty middle thrown of my father, so I decided to leave them.
“They’re not queens, though.” I explained the situation to Neill. “But everyone calls them that. Odette couldn’t have children, so she allowed my father, as is the mountain way, to take another wife.”
Neill was nodding in confusion, reaching up to scratch at his scruffy hair and almost unbalancing one of the smoke censers in the room. “Oh, sorry,” he said after seizing the large marble and bronze thing and, with several clangs, getting it to finally stop wobbling. It was clear to anyone that he was out of place – even when compared with the mountain clan people. The warlords, it seemed, were far more used to feasting and games of strength then they were of people singing sagas, poets, and fine clothes.
I guess that is why they are warlords, and my father’s people are nobles, I thought in despair.
“Woah.” Neill was looking around the upper galleries of the hall, seeing the tall, vaulted doorways that led to still more corridors and halls and banqueting rooms. The pillars that held up the balconies and galleries were carved with elaborate decorations, and the walls were hung with tapestries and mounted suits of armor. “And I thought that the Draconis Monastery was impressive,” he said with a sigh, and I thumped him in the shoulder.
“It’s not that rich. We don’t have any statues, walled gardens or anything. Just wait until you see Prince Griffith’s court, or Prince Vincent’s.” I laughed. “We Northlanders are considered pretty tame by comparison.”
“Comparison to what?” Neill said, and I decided that it was probably for the best if I didn’t answer ‘well, you warlord families,’ but he must have known. I suddenly felt very aware of how rich all of this was compared to the everyday people of the Three Kingdoms, and even to the sort of life that a successful warlord’s son like Neill must have grown up in.
I was lucky. And yet, I bit my lip at the opulence, the waste, the hollow laughter even here, in the rugged, harsher north, what I wouldn’t give to be out there, flying high above the clouds again!
“I found something out,” I whispered to Neill, telling him what my brother Wurgan had told me about parts of the Queen’s Keep being sealed off by my father.
“Do you remember what it was like before leaving for the monastery?” Neill scratched at his collar once more. “What was in those rooms that are now sealed off? And what your father might be hiding in there?”
“I remember the keep of course, but I only ever saw the parts where I was allowed to go, as a daughter of a prince. I was young when I was sent off for the Order. Remember, it was a few years ago – and I always tried to spend more time with my mother’s people anyway. But I do remember one thing… Where my father’s old throne room was.” I nodded to the three thrones that we had just walked past. “They never used to be here. This here used to be a throne room especially for the prince, which I guess could have been so old as to have been originally here, for the old queen herself,” I said.
I had taken a walk around the keep just yesterday, trying to find any hiding places that my father could have used to stash the Great Crown of the Queen (if indeed, he was the brother to have it!) There were large areas of the keep where the heavy wooden doors remained locked, or even had been bricked up, all ‘because the prince didn’t have enough guards’ as the excuse went.
“Well, the old throne room is one of those areas that are locked, and so is the stairwell to the old vaults, where my father is supposed to store the kingdom’s gold,” I said.
“Sounds as good a place as any to start looking for a crown!” Neill nodded, his eyes running to the doors. “Which way? Where are we headed?”
“We can’t go now,” I said in alarm, thinking of the eyes that were already on us, the princess and the oaf of a warlord’s son.
“Char, we have to,” Neill said in exasperation. “Just think of Lila, Sigrid and the others back at the monastery – think of the hatchlings in the crater. They are depending on us.”
“Of course I know that,” I whispered back. Had he thought that I had forgotten? “But we cannot go right now, everyone will see!” Did he really think that I didn’t care at all about the others on Dragon Mountain?
“I hope that you’re not planning something terrible with that dragon of yours?” said a man’s voice from behind us, and we spun around to see none other than Lady Bel accompanied by a younger officer– a tall man at least a few years older than me, but what struck me first about him was that his lower jaw had been smashed--an old battle injury perhaps?—which also made him lisp terribly.
“Lady Nefrette, this is Captain Tobin Tar, whom I told you about?” the Lady Bel said through narrowed eyes. “The Princess Odette decided that it was about time that you two met,” she said with a brittle smile, before looking s
everely at Neill beside me. “Young master Torvald, can I interest you in a tour of the keep with me?” she asked, and even Neill, for all of his uncouth ways had the sense not to refuse a lady’s request at a noble court.
But that left me with this man, Tobin Tar. The more I looked at him, the more I saw that he was grotesque in many ways. His arms appeared too spindly to even hold a sword, but even more, his hands appeared deformed with the fingers on his right hand crumpled and awkward. I hated to think it, but I felt horrified at his injuries: an animal reaction, perhaps, to seeing such devastation in another creature.
Char! You should be ashamed of yourself! I thought guiltily. His hair had fled from the front part of his head, leaving the longer locks to fall behind his ears in greasy strings, and I could not help but notice his eyes were bright and inquisitive as they regarded me, and he wore fine clothes of sensible deep greens and golds.
“Please, forgive me,” (which I heard as pleesh, fore-giff me through the lisp of his broken lower jaw). “I know I am a fright to look at, especially for one so young as yourself.” He made an awkward, shrugging movement.
“No, of course not, Sir Tar,” I said quickly, wondering if my face had betrayed my horror. Was this the man that my parents wanted me to marry? Almost as soon as I had thought it, I felt a wave of shame. Why was I so shallow? There was nothing wrong with this man, only his physical form – and wasn’t one of my best friends in the form of a dragon? Did it only take a few nights back in my old life to suddenly become shallow and arrogant? It reminded me of Prince Vincent on the few times that I had seen him–how he had seemed obsessed with his and his followers’ appearances. I would not be anything like him.
“It was a hunting accident as a child,” Tar said, waving his crooked hand in front of his crooked face. “I thought that I could chase down the boar, but the boar had other thoughts in mind! She leapt a creek I had not seen, causing me to fall in it, and leaving me in this state that you see now.” Tar again made one of his awkward shrugs. “I thought that my life was over, until I realized that it wasn’t.”
Dragon Dreams (The First Dragon Rider Book 2) Page 14
