“It’s just…” Neill whispered beside me in a voice that was as low as a mouse’s squeak. “I’ve never had this life you’ve had.” He nodded at the giant and ornate tapestry, the flagstone floors, the wide corridors. “I’m not jealous, but I don’t see why you would want to give it up. Maybe you should marry that Tobin guy…” he said, shrugging a little.
“You don’t believe that,” I said.
“No, I don’t,” Neill agreed. “But it’s different for me. My brothers will never accept me anyway; I don’t have a prince for a father. I can do whatever I like, in a way…”
“My father won’t accept me, either,” I said and then told Neill about the earlier altercation on the roof, and how my father had wanted to call Paxala off to war, and about how he seemed to want to start a new dragon training regime up here, in the north. I remembered how Wurgan, my own brother had looked at me with anger and fear on his face when he realized that I would choose the dragon over the kingdom, and could even hear dragons in my head. “We can’t bring the dragons here because this isn’t their home, and Zaxx would only follow them and destroy everything,” I said. “And I would choose Paxala and my friends a hundred times over rather than marrying Tobin Tar,” I said. It was clear to me now: my friends, Paxala– they had stayed with me through thick and thin. Neill had reached out to me at the monastery when I was still regarded as ‘just a girl’ and an anathema to the monastery, and a child of the mountains as well. My friends didn’t like me for what marriage potential I had, or whose daughter I was. Paxala wasn’t trying to use me to get anything other than fish, whereas I felt that if I started on this road of choosing kingdom over my friends, then I might never have any real friends again. I would be caught, lonely and isolated, with everyone only wanting to use me for their own agendas.
The footsteps at the end of the corridor paused, scuffed, and stopped. We froze, and I dared to peek from the tapestry to see two black-booted feet coming towards us.
“Excuse me,” a voice slurred, and I realized that the voice and the feet coming towards us didn’t belong to a servant or a guard, but instead belonged to no one other than Captain Tar himself.
Oh crap. I thought. Had he heard what I’d just said about marrying him?
“You might as well come out, I know that you are there, Char, Neill. I heard you,” he lisped, pausing briefly.
The game was up. I had failed, I thought. What would father do now? Probably banish Neill. Lock me in my room. I stepped from behind the tapestry to see the mangled and ruined face of the clan’s captain standing there, looking at me with the hang-dog eyes of a kicked puppy.
“Tobin, please forgive me,” I hissed quickly. “I didn’t mean it like that…”
“I understand.” Tobin screwed up one side of his face in an approximation of a defeated grin. “I came to try and find the Torvald boy anyway, to ask him what his intentions were for you.”
“My intentions?” Neill turned a bright beetroot, stammering as he looked frantically between Tobin and me. “I, I…”
“Tobin,” I said quickly. “It is not what you think. We are involved in something that is so important, mightily important.” I had enough of people looking at me like I had let them all down, or like I was a freak just as my brother had. I would no longer hide or lie or pretend to be someone’s little girl or potential wife or anything else. I would just be me, and that meant that I had to be honest.
I told him. Not all of the information, granted, but enough for it to matter. About how I could communicate with Pax through my mind, and how the Draconis Order were not what they seemed. They farmed dragons, and they only barely had any sort of control over Zaxx the Golden, who killed whomever he wanted to.
Tobin Tar looked at us both for a long time. “So, you are telling me that you are doing all of this for your friend, the dragon up there, and the friends you left behind at the monastery?”
“Yes.” I nodded, and Neill did the same beside me.
“And that Crimson Red is like you, an outcast from its nest?” Tobin said quietly – not really a question as he looked at the floor, and muttered. “I understand what that feels like. My own parents thought I was a weakling after the accident, and I know what it is like to always be pushed out, to be ignored, and to be feared.” He raised his head to look directly at me. “For what it is worth, Char Nefrette – I never loved you. I didn’t know you, but I was willing to go through with this marriage for the sake of the kingdom. Now I know that you are here to save a friend, another outsider like ourselves, then I will help. The Tar Clan will continue to support the prince because that is what we always do – but I see no need to marry myself to a young woman who doesn’t want to marry me,” he said with a lopsided grin, and the tension dissolved. I felt a wave of relief wash over me, as I knew that we could indeed be friends.
“And Tobin, I want you to know that I believe you to be a good man, and one worthy of marrying a princess,” I said, and watched as he smiled.
“Come, Princess Char,” Tobin said. “You and the Son of Torvald here have work to do, and I will say, if anyone asks, that I saw you riding north and away into the mountains. That should at least give you a day or two to make your escape.”
“Thank you, Tobin,” I said, and Neill echoed my words as we rushed past him, towards the steps that I had taken just earlier that day.
“He is a good man,” Neill said when we had the chance to stop, and I nodded.
“Yes. We might need allies like him before this is over,” I thought, finding the narrow stairwell that had taken me to the roof, but instead of climbing upward, I chose down. Something had occurred to me just this evening – that this stairwell seemed to be a shortcut used by my father and brother, and that might mean that it led to areas which had not been blocked off yet. I explained my thinking to Neill behind me as we crept through the keep. “And there might be a way to get to the old Throne Room from there. I seem to remember a small audience chamber that my father never used, saying that there wasn’t enough light in there…”
As our steps descended, the air grew a little staler and dustier, but not cold. I wondered if we were near to the vast fires of the kitchens or the bath houses, as the walls felt vaguely warm.
“Blood! I smell blood.” Paxala’s thoughts suddenly burst into my mind, and I stumbled against the wall.
“Char? What is it?” Neill whispered from right beside me.
“It’s Pax. She’s saying that she can smell blood somehow, somewhere…” I paused, trying to collect my thoughts. When a dragon suddenly thinks at you and you are unprepared, it is a little like having a whirlwind piling through your home.
“Blood!”
“Where?” I breathed in the dark, wishing that I had thought to bring torches with me.
“You. Through you. Through that lump in the middle of your face you call a nose,” the dragon scolded me.
Could she use my senses? I felt vaguely alarmed by the idea, until I remembered that was exactly what I could do with her thoughts, after all. Was our bond growing stronger, now? Were we becoming closer and closer in our thoughts somehow? There was so much that we still didn’t know about the old legends of ‘dragon friends’ and the sorts of powers that they had, but it seemed to me that bits of the lore were coming true.
“So, Paxala can smell blood through my senses…?” I said out loud.
“It makes sense, she has a much better nose than humans.” Neill said.
I relaxed, taking a deep breath and allowing the dragon that sat inside my mind to sense the environment around me. It was strange, like having her here beside me, but at the same time invisible.
“There,” she said, and as I turned into the direction that she had been talking about, I could smell something acrid and bitter, but also spiced with something sooty and sharp, like cinnamon.
“What is that?” I murmured. If it was blood, then it wasn’t any blood that I recognized.
“Dragon blood,” Paxala said with a growl, and t
hrough our connection I could feel that she was shaking her wings out in frustration and agitation.
Yes. It was dragon blood, but old, ancient dragon blood, long since dried – and it was seeping out from one of the landing doors. “Down there.” I indicated the door for Neill to try and open, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Wait,” Neill said, taking out his short sword and wedging it between the hinges and the doorframe. “Now stand back,” he said, before throwing himself at the door. There was a loud thud, and a creak. It sounded deafening to me, and still the door hadn’t budged. I watched as he limped back, rubbing his shoulder, and readjusted the wedged sword before trying again. On the third try the wood around one of the hinges splintered and sheared off, and the door sagged outwards towards us, revealing the smell of dust to my normal nose, but the strong smell of blood and decay to the dragon’s senses I was connected to.
“What is this?” Paxala was starting to growl, I could tell that she was snuffing at the flagstones and battlements far above me, starting to scrabble at them.
“Easy, Pax, I don’t know what this is, but whatever it is – I think it happened a long time ago,” I said, taking a step forward past the ruined door to suddenly find myself bathed in an eerie bluish light.
“Earthstars!” Neill breathed in awe, and I could see that he was right. These rare crystals were the stuff of king’s vaults and legends, and just a handful of them could probably buy a house – here, the shards of faintly glowing blue crystal were set into the walls on either side of the narrow and low passageway that extended down into the keep. “Where are we, Char?” Neill breathed, tapping at the blue stones that always glowed in the dark.
“I don’t know,” I confided, drawing my long knife to walk forward. “From my old memories of the keep when I was a child, I had thought that this would lead the way to the old throne room, but I think that we have gone past it, to underneath the old queen’s throne room maybe. I’ve never been down here before – I didn’t even know that we owned any of these earthstar stones at all!”
“It must be a part of the old queen’s residence when she built this keep,” Neill said, trying to remove his short-sword from the door but failing. It was wedged tight. “Ah well. You’ll have to do the fighting from now on, Char,” he tried to joke, but the thought made me nervous. Neill was by far the better fighter than I was, so I quietly passed him my knife, and followed my nose.
The dragon’s senses led us in the only direction that the corridor also took us, straight to a round, circular chamber with a line of the bluish glowing earthstar crystals set in the walls around the room.
“What is this place?” Neill breathed beside me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But it looks pretty bad to me.”
In fact, to me it looked like the little chapel spaces in the Draconis Order monastery – a rounded sort of hexagonal room whose walls rose like a tube to a point, all made of solid brickwork. Only instead of those walls having stained glass windows as they would in the monastery, here they were studded with the blue crystals that provided the only light in the room, pouring down to fill a narrow space with an eerie glow. In the center of the room, intricately carved flagstones merged on a slab of stone that was almost chest high and stained with blood. But that wasn’t all.
“Uhm, Char?” Neill had walked around the stone and suddenly frozen, looking at the other side of the strange slab of blood-rock.
I don’t want to know what this is, I thought, taking a step around it to see there, a collection of long stones, each about as thick as my arm, with curious organic sort of curves and bumps on them. Beside them were chipped fragments of smaller stones – only they weren’t stones at all.
“Oh no,” I breathed. They were teeth, sharp dragon teeth about as long as my fingers, meaning that they were from a dragon that was younger even than Paxala above. And that means that these other stones weren’t stones at all… I picked the nearest one up, hefted it in my hands to see it clearer in the blue light. They weren’t stones but bones. Bones that were so old that they had calcified, becoming pale and rocklike in the way that ancient seashells at the beech also do.
“How old are they?” Neill breathed in horror, reaching down to pick up one of the dragon’s teeth as I did the same. They were still sharp as a pin after all of these years.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think that they are older than you and me, older than even my father up there.”
“The old queen.” Neill breathed, and I nodded in the glow. He was right. These must belong to the old queen when she had built this place, and had even lived here for a little while. Or else they might have belonged to someone who worked for the queen, an advisor or a personal seer or…
A monk, I thought in horror. “Neill? What was it those scrolls said about the Great Crown, again?” I asked lightly. Pleased for the distraction from this horrible sight as Neill rummaged around in his small carry-sack for the scroll fragments, which he read out.
“There. That bit. That the old queen asked for the rarest gems and metals to be mined, and then asked for the wisest of seers and priests to help her forge the Great Crown,” I indicated. “Wasn’t the Draconis Order around then as well? Wouldn’t they be some of the wisest of priests and seers?” I asked of the room. “And wouldn’t they be the only ones with access to young dragon bones?”
“What are trying to say, Char?” I could see Neill’s wide eyes as he looked at me. “That the Draconis Order somehow did this?” I could hear in his voice that he didn’t want to believe it, but he also knew that it was the truth. It had to be.
“I don’t know, Neill,” I said. “Either they were the ones who killed a young dragon here, or maybe not – but I am betting that they knew about it. Maybe the Draconis Order doesn’t do this anymore, but this is how they started. And we heard the Abbot arguing with Zaxx over which dragon he wanted to die in the crater. What if this is all a part of the same thing…?” I said, feeling my own bones shiver at just how terrible and appalling it was. A deep and cold certainty settled in my heart.
“Neill? We don’t only have to get the other hatchlings out of the crater--we have to save all of the dragons. We have to put a stop to the Draconis Order itself,” I said, watching as Neill nudged the bones out of the way.
Neill looked at the small dragon bones in our hands. “Yes, I think you are right,” he said gravely. A terrible quiet settled on his shoulders, and I realized that he was furious. I had seen Neill angry before of course, but this time it was a cold, quiet anger that I had not expected to see in him, usually. But yes, it is right to be angry about this, I thought. It is right to be furious about what the Order have been doing to dragons.
“Look,” Neill said, pointing to the flagstone underneath them, at the foot of the alter stone. What had been hidden by the bones was now visible. On the flagstone was a carving of a flame over a circle… A crown?
“Hang on a minute.” I knelt down to run my hand along the groove of the flagstone. Why was only this one carved, unlike any of the rest? “Neill – have you got that knife there?” I asked, as he saw what I had in mind and he leaned down to start prizing at the stone with the tip of my dagger. It was easier than I thought that it would be, as the groove around this carved stone was subtly wider than any of the other perfectly matching stones. Very carefully, with the aid of the knife and our fingertips we managed to scrape out the dust and dirt (and who knows what else, I couldn’t stop from thinking) and the carved stone started to wiggle under our hands.
“Okay, 1, 2, 3…” We carefully lifted it up, fraction of an inch by fraction, raising it higher and higher until Neill could get a hand under one corner and we were creaking it from its bed, to reveal a hollow in the mortar and rock beneath.
“Char…?” Neill was whispering at what lay in the hollow. It looked to be just a wrap of rubbish. A deep, mahogany leather binding rolled around and around itself in a wide sort of loaf of bread size. It was too small for a dragon skull, eve
n a hatchling.
There was only one thing that it could be. I reached down into the hole to brush the fabric. It was slightly greasy, as it had been oiled or soaked in preserving fluids. You only did that with metal, I thought, as I lifted the object out to find that it was surprisingly heavy in my hands.
“Now what?” I looked at Neill, who was looking at me in wonder and alarm in equal measure. I knew what the object could be but for some reason I didn’t even want to open it to find out. It was all too terrible. If this place belonged to the Old Queen Delia of the Three Kingdoms, before she split them off to give each to her sons, then there was a good chance that she herself had put this here, or had been in this room of dried dragon’s blood and bones herself. She was still, despite the long and strange years that she had lived, technically my grandmother on my father’s side, and my father himself was her son, the Prince of the Northern Realm. Didn’t that make all of this my legacy, this terrible, horrible family secret was finally coming home to roost.
I flipped over the top flap of leather to reveal a round of metal. In fact, there were two rounds of metal, one over the other, with the larger ‘inner’ round being gold, and the outer band steel or silver. The crown was very heavy, and had fluting peaks at the front and the sides, ornately carved into tiny forms of arching dragons. At its front was a giant ruddy ruby the size of my fist, and two very faint blue earthstars on either side, that brightened as I brought them out into the glowing light of their brethren.
The Great Crown of the Three Kingdoms. We had found it.
For a long moment, we both just crouched there, staring at it, unable to believe our eyes.
“Char,” Neill pointed to what else had been wrapped up in the rags with the Great Crown. Fragments of a book; cracked brown leather stitched onto thin pieces of board, with cobweb-thin pages moldering inside. I almost didn’t want to open it. With all of these bones and blood soaked into the stone, whatever was in that tiny grimoire couldn’t be good. But I knew that I had to open it. We had to know what was the nature of the great crime that had been perpetrated by the Order, if we were ever going to address it. I carefully raised the book from its covering and gingerly pulled it open.
Dragon Dreams (The First Dragon Rider Book 2) Page 16
