The air felt damp and strangely warm as my hand passed through it, but there was no pain, no sudden sharp attack as the dragon magic repelled those for whom it felt no kinship. My hand came down smoothly to rest on the bone.
“Well,” said the man. “What about that? What does it feel like?”
“It feels warm,” I told him. “Like it’s still alive.”
“Pick it up,” he told me.
My head told me not to, but my fingers closed around the wand on their own, lifting it off the velvet. It was surprisingly light, like the bone of a bird, and as warm as blood.
“That doesn’t hurt?” asked the man.
I shook my head.
“Hand it over.”
I tried to, but my fingers clutched instinctively at the wand, refusing to give it up.
“That’s how it is, is it?” said the man. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Then hold onto it for the moment. Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?” I whispered, my throat as dry as if I had suddenly awoken in the middle of the night from a bad fever.
“To take the second part of the test,” he told me, still speaking gently. “Come, Laela. You can hold onto the wand for now. But you have to take the second part of the test, and it’s best to do that in private.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because sometimes it makes you vomit,” he told me, and with those heartening words, folding up his rickety table and began walking away from the market square.
I trailed after him, still clutching the piece of bone. I was now holding it in both hands, I noted, and pressing it to my heart, where it felt like the rightest thing that had ever happened to me. Sometimes when I held newborn babes and they fell asleep against my chest I had the same feeling, but this was stronger. This must be what it is like to hold your own child, not someone else’s. Only this was not my own flesh and blood, but the bone of someone else who was not even human, and long dead.
“What do you know of the training?” the man asked abruptly, as we turned down a narrow street and headed towards the one inn in the village. “The training to become a dragon sorcerer? Or sorceress, in your case.”
“I know that it takes place in the mountains,” I said. “I know that it is hard. I know that not everyone who is chosen makes it through.”
He sighed. “All true,” he said. “Everyone thinks it will be wonderful, to become a sorcerer and learn the secrets of magic, but much of it is not wonderful. Much of it is the same as anything else, only harder. They take naïve and foolish youths—well, not so young in your case—and forge them into dragons. Most do not enjoy the process, and many do not enjoy what they become, either. But still none can say no.”
I wanted to stop. I even told myself to stop, to throw the bone down and run away, but I didn’t. Instead I kept walking behind him, still clutching the bone wand to my chest.
“What does the bone do?” I asked, in order to keep myself from thinking of my failure to escape. “Why is it special?”
“All things that are infused with the essence of dragons are filled with power, Laela,” he told me. “Including, it seems, you. We use wands of bone to give us strength and help focus our power.”
“How did you get it?” I asked. “You can’t just hunt down a dragon.”
“No, you can’t. Not that we would. Especially since no one has seen any dragons for generations. But there are many graves in the mountains.”
I looked down at the wand. I didn’t like the thought that it was the result of grave-robbing. But I couldn’t let go of it even so.
We came to the inn. The thunder—or was it the mountains spitting fire?—was getting louder. When we ducked inside, the innkeeper and the half-dozen people who had come in to take shelter from the storm stared at us.
“This way,” said the man. I followed him down the corridor to his room. I realized I had never gone into a strange man’s room, and I suddenly wondered if my unusual act of recklessness was about to be repaid by a very ordinary and banal punishment. The bone wand felt comfortingly warm under my fingers and against my chest. I wondered if it would protect me. If the stories I had heard were true, then no, it would not, for all its comforting, living warmth in my hand.
“Shut the door,” said the man. I did so even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t say why. He bent over a chest on the floor and began rummaging through it.
“Here we are,” he said, pulling something small out of the chest. “Try this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his hand, revealing a glass vial half-full of a red liquid that glowed even in the gloom of the shuttered room and rainy day. “The second part of the test,” he said.
“What do I do with it?” I asked.
“First of all, take it from me. Give me the wand, and take the vial from me.”
My fingers did not want to release the wand, but they wanted to touch the vial with its strange liquid, that was lit from within like a ruby in full sunlight despite the twilight surrounding us, even more. In a moment the wand was gone, and the vial was in my hands.
“How does it feel?” asked the man.
“Warm,” I told him. “Even warmer than the wand.”
“But it’s not burning you?”
I shook my head.
“Good.” He reached over and, gripping my hands in his own, unstoppered the vial. “Now, I’m going to pour a tiny amount into your mouth. Just a drop, do you understand? Take no more than a drop.”
“I have to drink it? Why?”
“Because that’s the test,” he told me.
“What is it?” I tried to ask, even though some part of me already knew, but before I could get the words out, he had brought the vial up to my mouth and forced the neck between my lips, tilting it so that my head tipped back and a tiny drop of the red liquid rolled out and landed on my tongue.
Fire...I was diving into the fire, but there was no pain...soaring above a snow-capped mountain spine, looking down at all the land and all the settlements, and knowing they were all mine, that I was the mistress of everything I could see from wherever my wings could take me...
“Well, look at that,” whispered the man. My eyes, which must have shut in my ecstasy, came back open and followed his gaze to my hands. In the glow from the vial it appeared for a moment as if my hands, too, were glimmering, with an iridescence like a bird’s feathers or a snake’s scales.
I jerked back, pulling free of his grip. “What was that?” I demanded. “What happened? What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” he repeated back at me. He smiled crookedly, revealing sharp teeth that in the uncertain light looked almost fang-like. His eyes, though, were wholly human, and sad. “It means you are a dragon, Laela. Just like me.”
THE MAN, WHOSE NAME, he told me, was Joki, told me to arrange to set off the next morning. I told him I couldn’t possibly leave that soon. I had affairs to settle, and people who needed me. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could leave at all.
“And what will you do here, Laela?” he asked. “Sit at home in your empty cottage, waiting to help with the breech births of babes who won’t thank for you for your troubles, and then—because you will live a long life, like all of our blood—write their wills when the time comes for them to leave the world they were so troublesomely brought into? They won’t thank you for that either. Your sacrifice will be in vain. Come with me. At least this way your life will be worth something.”
“And what about you?” I asked. “Will you thank me? Will all the other dragons thank me for what I will give up for them?”
He was silent for a while. “Maybe not,” he said eventually. “But you might thank yourself. There is value in the knowledge you will gain that is worth more than any thanks.”
We argued for a time, but in the end, as we both knew would happen, I said I would ask my neighbor Marja to look after the cottage, send everyone to Helmi in the next village if they needed healing, and write to my parents and m
y sister, who had moved to the city, to tell them where I was going.
“I’m only going to look,” I told him. “I’m not promising to stay.”
“There will be more testing anyway,” he told me. “You’ll have to pass those tests to be allowed to stay in any case.”
I thought a good number of hard things about the arrogance of the dragon-sorcerers, and even more hard things about myself and how those warning words did not serve to dissuade me, since any idiot could see what they were up to, like a pretty-ish girl making herself more desirable by advertising all the other suitors she had. But even so I didn’t turn back, because some part of me couldn’t help but think, as easy as everything had been so far, that I would pass whatever the other tests were with equal ease, and pass all the training, and have wealth and health, knowledge and power beyond my wildest dreams. Like, I thought waspishly, a not-so-pretty girl convincing herself that just because she had had no trouble luring the richest boy of the village into her bed, she would have no trouble luring him into love, marriage, and fidelity as well. But I still didn’t say no.
Joki said that my preparations to leave should take no more than a day, and he was depressingly correct. I had always thought I was tightly woven into the fabric of my village, but by mid-afternoon the next day I had already packed up my clothes, written to my family, and informed everyone whom I thought needed informing of what had happened. No one even seemed that surprised, or that sorry to see me go. Not because they disliked me, but because they all had their own concerns, and as long as they didn’t need me, I did not enter into them. I was a convenience, like a hired horse, and like a hired horse, could be easily abandoned when the time came.
We set off the next morning, me, Joki, and Joki’s horse, who was a ewe-necked, swaybacked bay gelding named Tähti and who hardly looked strong enough to pull Joki’s cart, which was as shabby as his clothes.
“What do you feed him?” I demanded when I saw Tähti.
“Whatever the hostlers give him,” said Joki, pulling at his ear and looking uncomfortable. “Or whatever he can graze.”
“He needs good hay,” I said severely. “And oats in small quantities, mixed in with a nice bran mash to keep him from colicking.”
Joki shrugged. “Be my guest,” he told me. “If you can get those things for him, I won’t complain.” He climbed into the cart, his shoulders radiating an unwillingness to speak more on the subject.
“I’ll walk,” I told him. “We’ll probably go faster that way anyway.”
Joki’s shoulders radiated even more unwillingness to get into a discussion as they shrugged in irritated acquiescence. And so we set off from the village with Tähti leading the way at a slow amble, and me, as I had predicted, easily keeping pace on foot behind.
It was a beautiful fall day, with a bright blue sky overhead and a chill wind hinting at winter blowing down from the mountains. The trees were just turning their colors, and the air promised changing seasons and hard times ahead. Which everyone always knew about autumn, and yet somehow loved it anyway.
Joki was supposed to visit three more villages, he told me, but now that he had found me, he was going to escort me directly to the mountains instead.
“I’m unlikely to find anyone there,” he said. “And I don’t want to risk you, do I?”
“Is the journey likely to be that risky?” I asked. “The war is far away, and I haven’t heard reports of bandits in these parts for a long time.”
“All journeys are risky,” he told me, looking off at the sky. “I’ll feel better once we’re safely home.”
I wanted to argue that where we were going was no home to me, but I refrained. We walked in silence for the rest of the morning. Then we ate in silence at midday, and walked on in silence for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes I broke the silence by asking Joki about himself or about where we were heading, but he would only tell me that there was nothing interesting about his story, and I would find out soon enough about my new home when I got there. So I wrapped up as best I could against the wind that was blowing harder and harder, tearing the turning leaves from the trees and whipping away the warmth from the bright sun, and looked to the left and the right as we moved farther and farther away from the only place I had ever called home.
In midafternoon we turned away from the fields we had been walking through, and began to climb up a gentle wooded incline. So deceptively mild was the entrance into the mountains. The hill and the trees gave us shelter from the wind, and the sun shining on our backs, combined with the climb, warmed us properly for the first time that day.
“We’ll have to camp out for the night,” Joki announced abruptly, as the shadows were growing across the road. “No inns along here. Not till we make it to the pass.”
“How far is the pass?” I asked.
“Two more days to the first one. Then three days to the next. And then three more days to...”
“So mainly camping,” I said. “In the cold. And probably the rain.”
“Is that a problem? I didn’t take you for a finicky city girl.”
“If you’ve ever seen the city, you’d know that no one who made it their home could ever be called finicky.”
Joki broke into a smile for the first time that day. “True enough,” he agreed. “Well, no need to worry. The cart makes a decent enough bed. Or you can sleep under it, if you prefer.”
I opened my mouth to ask more about the sleeping arrangements, but, faced with Joki’s uncomfortable shoulders, shut it again. We would come to our agreement when we stopped. When he thought I wasn’t paying attention, I would catch Joki looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as he always had ever since I had become old enough to catch his attention. I wondered how much the fact that he was old enough to be my father would restrain him. Or just considerations of common decency. I wondered how much common decency he or any of the other men I was soon to meet would have. Probably even less than the men I had already met in my life, so precious little. Joki didn’t seem that dangerous, but...he was a dragon-sorcerer. Presumably in any fight against me or any other ordinary human, he would win. So I would have to rely on my cunning and his better feelings.
“Do you have any children?” I asked, hoping to stoke those better feelings.
“No.” He was looking off at the sky again. “Not that I know of. Maybe. None with the blood. So no.”
“Children without the blood are still children! They’re still yours! They still matter!”
“Yes,” he agreed, still looking off at the sky. “And no. You’ll find out when your time comes.”
I wanted to argue against that very hard, but I was afraid to remind him any more than he was already reminded that I certainly had the blood, even if none of his possible children did, and that, according to him, I would always breed true. So I swallowed back my arguments and ran over to the edge of the road to look through a break in the trees down to where we had been.
The valley spread out below in the soft beige squares of harvested fields, broken by the occasional burst of red from the maple groves. The slope we were on was covered in golden birches, warmed by the setting sun, which was releasing the scent of falling leaves.
“Can you see far from...there?” I asked, returning to Joki and giving him the question as a peace offering. “Does it have views like this?”
He shook his head. “All you can see is the peaks above, and the gorge below,” he told me. “A harsh view, and closed in. The mountains are not always a place of freedom.”
“So what’s the point, if there’s no freedom?” I asked.
“Power,” he told me, looking at me directly for the first time that day. “Knowledge and power. And health and wealth, of course, but that’s not what interests you, is it?”
I shook my head, a tiny movement. Health I had always had in abundance, and I believed Joki when he told me that I was likely to live a long life. They said that dragon-sorcerers could live forever, but forever was too long to imagine. A h
undred years or so seemed enough to me now, barely a third of the way through that journey. And wealth held little attraction: what could I buy with coin that my healthy body couldn’t already give me? Even power...power to do what? There was no one I wanted to kill, no realms I wanted to rule. But knowledge...
“Was it knowledge for you, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said after a time, looking down. “Or so I would claim. The truth is, Laela, that if the blood is in you, you cannot say no to it. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the blood, and no one can deny it.”
I shivered. The cold wind coming down from the mountaintops, I told myself. It was blowing hard enough to ripple the water of the horseponds in the fields below; more than enough to give me chills. “Enough of that,” I said. “We should look for a place to stop, if we’re going to be stopping by the side of the road for the night.”
“There’s a campsite up around the next turn,” Joki told me. “If we’re lucky we’ll be alone there.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, although there was neither threat nor promise in his words, but I silently hoped that we would not be alone. I silently hoped that there would be a noisy family party camping there with us. A couple of crying babes would make things safe for everyone, and lost sleep could always be made up later.
But when we came to the campsite, which was simply a wide flat spot carved out into the hillside by the side of the road, with a trickle of water running down the hill into a pool next to it, no one else was there. Joki unharnessed Tähti, brushed him down in a very desultory fashion, and set him to grazing on the sparse grass.
“Don’t you have any feed for him?” I asked.
“There’s grass.”
“No wonder he’s so thin!”
Joki gave me no reply other than to look away guiltily.
“He’ll never get up the mountain if we don’t feed him properly,” I said.
The Magical Book of Wands Page 13
