Highland Dragon Master

by Isabel Cooper

  “True.”

  “And it’d… Do the men think so too?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Nor, I’d guess, do they—or not enough of them that we’d have any trouble reminding them what’s their business and what isn’t.”

  Toinette stared at him, not daring to shift her weight lest the ground suddenly tilt under her. “But I brought them here,” she said finally, staring at Marcus, “and it was because of Erik.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but neither of you knew this would happen. We all knew that it was uncharted waters, and that the world is strange. And besides that, you weren’t bedding him when you signed on. I can swear to that. Why would it matter if you did now?”

  “My judgment—”

  “Doesn’t get any worse for doing the deed rather than pining over it. I knew you when Jehan was living, remember?” He paused and frowned. “Did he know?”

  Toinette sighed. “Not entirely. I told him I aged slowly, and that I couldn’t have children. He…had two brothers, both with large broods, or so he said.” The memory of that conversation, of Jehan’s hands closed around hers and his gentle smile, brought a smile to her own lips even ten years later. “He just wanted me.”

  “But you loved him.” It wasn’t a question, and didn’t need to be. “And yet I remember you arguing with him time and time again, when you thought you knew what would be best.”

  “Saint Paul never would have approved of me.”

  “No indeed,” Marcus said. “But we all knew that from the start. Love doesn’t cloud your judgment, Captain, not when it matters that you have a clear head. I’ll tell as much to any man who questions your thinking, and then I’ll break his jaw if I must.”

  Toinette’s throat closed. The effort to clear it would have revealed too much of her heart, and so she could only smile her thanks.

  “That said,” Marcus went on, “best if you not plan on any merriment tonight. We’re badly in need of more to take watch.”

  “And you want us to join? You must be desperate,” Toinette managed to joke, though in truth the request touched her nearly as much as Marcus’s declaration.

  While he laughed, it ended soon, and he studied her for a long moment while Sence made his way down the tree above them. “You don’t think much of people, do you?”

  “You know that. It’s kept me alive.”

  “Maybe. But love isn’t the only sentiment that can twist a mind.”

  Twenty-Five

  As with so much since he’d boarded the Hawk, Erik was new to night watch. The benefits of rank had meant he’d never had to be sentry, even in times of war, and he’d been a passenger on the ship, not one of the crew. He hadn’t balked at Marcus’s not-really-request. Every man had to pull his weight, and the dreams weren’t letting him sleep very well as it was.

  Telling time was hard, as their travel had put the moon and the stars in different places. The flickering green light was back in the sky that night too, and it obscured the stars at times. By the time the sandglass from the ship was halfway empty on Erik’s watch, he thought it was somewhat past midnight, but he had no way of knowing for sure.

  Truly, it didn’t matter. His watch would pass when it passed. He’d wake Samuel and then get what sleep he could. When the sun rose, they’d all wake and the day would start. The time of the outside world was unimportant.

  Sitting and watching the sea, with the fire’s banked embers in the shelter behind him and the witch light in the sky, Erik could easily believe all of the outside world unimportant—even a dream, at times.

  It was a more pleasant dream than the ones he had while sleeping. He’d grown almost used to talking corpses, but that in itself was unsettling.

  He’d grown almost used to too many things.

  The conversation with Marcus came back to him. If they did stay—if they had to stay—then what? Breed themselves like horses and hope to have daughters who could pair with the men? Would they even have the necessary materials for the rites? And wouldn’t any resulting families be far inside the lines of consanguinity with each other?

  Granted, plenty of noble families ignored the Church’s guidelines about cousins; still, Erik didn’t like the thought.

  The sky flickered green again, the color of rotting flesh, reminding him once more that the past was not only years but miles away. Below it, the shadows stretched out into odd proportions and danced spasmodically along the sand. The sea roared in and out in front of Erik; behind him, the fire was almost dead and even he could make out no sound from the shelter.

  His sword hung at his side. In a breath, he could have twenty such swords, not to mention the other advantages of his dragon form.

  Sitting alone in the night, he found that such knowledge helped him as little as did prayer.

  * * *

  The cottage stood empty but solid, with mud filling the gaps between logs and small pine branches forming a roof, parting in the middle for a hole to let smoke out. The next task was to stack wood at one end, that there might be enough to sustain them during a blizzard; in time, they’d put stores of food in the same place.

  Carrying out such plans still felt like surrender. They might seek a way off the island, but they were all coming to accept that they’d likely be trapped at least through winter, as the weather would cut them off on its own if they broke the spell too late in the year. Even so, Toinette was finding a certain contentment in the hewing, shaping, and stacking of wood, as she did in catching and drying fish or digging roots, and a satisfaction when she watched the stores of food grow or eyed the sturdy cabin walls.

  As a city child, she’d had little of that feeling, save for the rare occasions when her message-running and her mother’s sewing had actually filled the little leather purse they kept beneath their pillows. She’d come to know it more as a captain, looking with satisfaction over neat account books and well-stocked holds; she’d never spared a thought for whether it was possible in other trades.

  Stacking logs while Samuel and Raoul cut, Toinette startled herself with the notion that the clearing wouldn’t have been so bad in a normal place. Yes, the woods were uncanny: the voices and their half-formed words hadn’t gotten any rarer, and the strange light flickered in the sky every few nights. Her dreams featured crawling corpses, and what they said was no more kind than it ever had been. The island was not a good place.

  The clearing might have been a good place, otherwise. With a wide swath of the plants slashed away, burnt, or eaten—or stored to be food or firewood later—the pines and moss-covered stones reminded Toinette of the forests around Loch Arach.

  She’d been happy there, due only in part to better room and board. There she’d learned to control her body’s deadly potential. There too, for the first and last time in her life, she’d been among people who’d known all of what she was and taken it as not only acceptable but commonplace. Toinette’s life since had held its share of joy, but never had there been so little need for concealment.

  The first night after she’d left Loch Arach, she’d curled herself up on a flea-ridden inn mattress and wept into her pillow, silently so that she wouldn’t wake the other guests. She had understood Artair’s decision, as she’d told Erik, just as she’d understood what Agnes had told her and why—but that understanding only deprived her of the comfort that anger would have provided.

  Rage against heaven had never much appealed to her, and even if she took a liberal view of her own damnation, God had presumably made Artair MacAlasdair a lord, and herself the bastard on his doorstep—not even one of his own get. To blame him for acting accordingly, and soundly by any practical view, was the sort of luxury men like Erik could afford. Toinette never let herself expect anything else.

  She’d had years of good food and education. She had skills to be going on with and knowledge of her own powers. Bless the slack, she’d told herself. Don’t curs
e the drop. Everything ends.

  The thought had been less balm than Toinette hoped, but time and the distractions of a new life had eased the ache of parting. She’d learned to be happy despite concealment—it wasn’t that difficult—and had put from her mind any chance of finding again the honesty she’d been able to practice at Loch Arach.

  Two centuries later, she straightened up with an armful of wood and realized that she had found it again, and more. Little else about the situation, or the island itself, was good—but, through force of circumstance, Toinette hadn’t needed to bother hiding her nature from anyone since they’d landed.

  She leaned against the cabin walls and laughed until Raoul poked his head around the corner. “Captain?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, though the earnest concern on his young face made her want to keep laughing even as it touched her heart. He might have been only worried that she’d run mad and would kill them all, or that she’d need to be taken care of, but his expression said otherwise. “I just… I realized how little I ever thought I’d wind up in a place like this, that’s all.”

  Raoul laughed, nodding and clearly relaxing. The captain wasn’t having a hysterical fit, thank God. “Oui, I thought I’d taken my last sight of such houses,” he said, gesturing to the cabin, “and never that I’d be hunting for food again, or chopping wood. Though here there’s no bailiff’s wrath to fear—always a hidden blessing, my mother would say.”

  “I was just thinking along those lines myself,” said Toinette. “Not about bailiffs, precisely.”

  “No,” said Raoul, “I’d not imagine you ever feared anything from them.”

  “Only because I didn’t live in the country.” She’d hidden from the constables on occasion as a child, though she’d not often resorted to picking pockets. “We’re none of us saints. I’m surely not.”

  “Saints can come from all walks of life, so long as they repent.”

  “Well—” Toinette began, intending a laughing remark on the subject of repentance, when an immense roar split the air.

  She dropped the logs without a moment’s more thought and spun toward the source of the noise, sword already drawn. She heard crashing then, and a great deal of it—almost as much as she’d cause in dragon form.

  Erik, she thought, and he had led Marcus and Franz northeast, where the noise was coming from. The roar hadn’t sounded like him, though: too guttural and somehow too wet.

  Raoul and Samuel were by her side, Samuel with the ax he’d been using to chop wood and Raoul with his sword. “Go back,” she said to them. “Get everyone on the beach to shelter, and be ready to defend.”

  “From what?” Samuel asked.

  “I don’t know. I will soon enough.”

  Twenty-Six

  “The captain,” observed John, following Erik under an overhanging branch that had looked too much trouble to break, “isn’t at all Scottish, is she?”

  “No.” Erik cut briars out of the way and stomped forward through the more amenable undergrowth. He didn’t look back at John when he answered, but kept alert for any sign: the white of old bone, the glint of metal, or more odd-looking plants. “One of yours, in fact. That is, she grew up in London until she came to us.”

  “We don’t have dragons.”

  Sence, bringing up the rear, snorted. “You know of everything in your nation?”

  “We warred with the Scots. If we had dragons, we’d have used them. Although”—John’s voice became thoughtful—“if we don’t, I wonder that we won the first time. You’re hardly new.”

  “No,” Erik said again. Up ahead, one of the pines lining the game path was split, one section curving down over the game trail in a twisted loop. It looked like the aftermath of a storm, with wind or lightning equally likely culprits, but he studied it for a long moment regardless, looking for signs of stranger things.

  None came to mind. He marked the place in his memory, for good firewood later if nothing else, and went on in both body and speech. “I’ve not seen nor heard of Englishmen with our blood, and certainly none fighting on your side. And I think, if there were dragon-blooded in England, Toinette wouldn’t have come to us. You have other forms of magic. Some as deadly.”

  “The spells you’ve been teaching us?”

  “Some. We spoke often enough with the English wizards before the war, I hear, and traded tips as many a craftsman might. Since then—” He shrugged and swatted at an insect on his neck. “We only know what we’ve seen in battle. Your folk are more likely to use devices, or things summoned, to strike from afar. Nor do I doubt there’s scrying on both sides, though that’s always a chancy matter.”

  “So we’ve seen.” John slashed at the shrubs around him. He always was more set on clearing his trail than Erik, but then, he was human and wounds hurt him more. “You seem ready enough to tell me these matters.”

  Erik laughed, though he tried to make it come out kindly. “All who could use such knowledge already have it. On both sides.”

  “And will you be a soldier, of a sudden?” Sence asked. “Even if we do get free of this rock and return before any war meets its end?”

  “Doubtful,” said John. “But I’ve a wife and sons to think of, and friends enough who’d fight for my king, whether by will or by levy.”

  That was always the way of it in war. That was one of the reasons Artair had sent Erik away, and one of the reasons he’d welcomed the mission. He had no good reply to John, so he looked ahead—and saw a flicker of movement, something huge and dark in the brush.

  He held up a hand. All three of them went still, and in the silence came the sound of creatures moving toward them: yet a goodly distance away, but large beasts by the way branches snapped beneath their weight. Erik sniffed the air, but the wind was against them, and the presence of men so close muddled his senses.

  “String bows,” he whispered. They’d seen no signs of wolves or bears, nor yet great cats; the largest beast they’d encountered had been Franz’s elk. “This could be a threat or a meal.”

  Death or dinner came through the forest fast. The trees blocked Erik’s view for a long while. He saw dark shapes, easily taller than a man, and he thought there were three of them, though the lines of head and body were yet indistinct. More elk, he thought. With luck, the men would shoot true and they’d have more food stores.

  “We’ll take the one on the right,” Sence whispered behind him. “Likely the others will run when it dies, but best be sure of the kill.”

  He was right: chasing wounded prey through the forest would be a hardship, and worse when that prey was large and capable of kicking through wood. Erik sighted to the right, an arrow ready, and hoped the smell of him didn’t scare the elk off.

  They came through from the northeast, knocking small trees down ahead of them, and instantly he realized that nothing would scare them off, and eating them would be a horrible idea.

  Once they, or their ancestors, had likely been elk, though they had no antlers. They’d changed.

  Taller than him at the shoulder, they ran on spindly legs below grotesquely bloated bodies, in which one part often seemed to separate from the next, only to merge back together moments later. White bone stood out in jagged spikes from their backs and sides, and their teeth had outgrown their mouths, protruding through their cheeks.

  All of the men loosed arrows at once, acting as much from horrified instinct as prior plan. All three took the rightmost elk-thing in the chest. It staggered backward and roared, a sound that had in it the slap of rotten meat against earth, but it didn’t fall, and the others showed no fear, nor even comprehension.

  “Get behind me,” said Erik. “Keep shooting.”

  The change was slower than he would’ve liked, the trees getting in the way, and as he shook his wings out, one of the creatures slammed into his side. Only a third his size, it nonetheless had weight behind its char
ge, weight that Erik felt cracking his ribs, and it reared up its head to sink teeth into his wing.

  He swiveled his neck backward and returned the favor, closing his jaws around the elk-thing’s neck. It was cold in his mouth, not merely as a dead thing might have been but as the depths of the ocean. The taste of it blended rot and a cold, unfamiliar acridness—and the elk was heavy, even heavier than he would have expected from a thing its size. At first he couldn’t even pry it away from his body. Yet it wasn’t quite there either. His teeth slid through it in places, as though it were air, only to encounter icy meat and jagged bone a short distance away.

  When he clawed at the creature, his talons met the same mixture of flesh and nothingness, mingled in no pattern that he could recognize. Meanwhile it kicked sideways at him, far too nimbly, and its sharp hooves sliced through scales and skin alike.

  Arrows sang through the air around him. The elk bellowed as the arrows hit, halted, shook themselves, and came forward again. Erik snapped his tail around and whipped the legs out from under one, flung its brother away with a painful flex of neck and claws, and braced himself just as a third hit him in the chest. It reared up on its hind legs; as Erik whipped his head forward, he looked into its face and saw the same pale eyes that had stared at him from the dead in his dream.

  He was glad not to be in man’s shape then. The dragon form cared less about such things, knew mostly the fight and the present moment. Inside it, Erik, son of Lamorak, marked what he saw and shivered.

  There was little time. He slashed out at the creature in front of him, knocking aside seeking, malformed teeth—they looked sharp, but uneven, broken that way rather than the product of any natural growth—and nearly severing its head. It slumped before him, but the wound began almost at once to knit together. Another ran at him again. His mouth tasted of his own blood, which was better than that of the monsters but didn’t bode well.

  A shape dashed by him, light flashing on drawn steel and copper hair alike. Toinette hit the ground, rolled on one shoulder, and lunged, slicing through the legs of the elk that was coming up on Erik. As it fell, she leapt aside, clumsy on the uneven ground but quick enough to make it back to Erik’s side. “Fire,” she yelled up at him.