Highland Dragon Master

by Isabel Cooper

  It was the same unnatural light that Erik had seen from the beach and grown used to there. In the forest, it was far brighter, spreading out in rings of green witch fire from, of course, the temple. No pain accompanied it, but with every flash he felt a vague pressure on… He didn’t know what, precisely, but supposed it was the part of him that was kin to beasts, that bled and breathed and ate just as a dog or a horse did.

  The light grasped that and pulled. In replacement, it offered…other things. Itself, or the shadow it cast.

  No, Erik said inwardly. For him that was all it took. For a man without dragon’s blood, he thought rejection might be harder; for an animal, the offer would be no offer at all.

  Against his chest, Toinette swore in what sounded like Muscovite. He still welcomed the touch of her breath, still wanted his arms tight around her, but the feeling of pleasant, lazy lust was gone. Neither of them moved.

  “Should have expected this, I suppose,” said Toinette. “Would have, if I’d thought about it. Where else would the light come from?”

  “It explains why part of the island is normal. This power doesn’t stay this strong very far out.” Erik peered off into the forest as the flares of green radiance washed over him. The oddness of the forest went beyond the darkness, and the power in the temple clearly could reach further, or they would have long since been at sea, but the worst of the changes seemed to be where the light fell. “And what happened to the elk. The female and her young went too close. Poor souls. They’d never have understood what went wrong with them.”

  “That might be better than the other way,” said Toinette. “To know what you lost.”

  “Mmm,” he said, neither agreeing nor disputing.

  They watched the light. After Erik had refused it once, it had no further pull on him, he found. It was only a change in the sky. “I think,” he said, “that it’s safe enough to sleep. In watches, of course. And minding each other as well as the woods.”

  “I’ll go first. Let you know if you start looking demonic.” Toinette clearly made an effort to speak lightly. When she went on, after a time of silence, Erik first thought she was trying to change the subject, distracting them both from the possibility of transformation—and what the one who remained unaltered would have to do. “How long do women live, if they breed with us?”

  “Pure mortals? Two hundred years or thereabouts. So I’ve heard. I’ve not seen it firsthand, though Cathal’s wife doesn’t look past thirty, and she can’t be younger than fifty.”

  “Oh,” Toinette said. “My mother may yet live. I’d wondered.”

  “Likely,” Erik replied, choosing his words with care. This was unsteady ground. “When did you last see her?”

  Toinette laughed shortly. “When I was almost thirteen. I believe I was one of the last few. She took the veil shortly after I left, became an anchorite. Walled up in Somerset. I made inquiries fifty years back, and she lived then, though the abbot was loath to speak of her. There are those who think she’s a saint, for having lived so long, or a prophet.” She wound her words out like thread on a spindle, one long unstoppable strand that then came to an abrupt halt: “She’s quite lost her wits.”

  As with the light, Erik had known what was coming, or should have, and yet it left him frozen and staring. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

  The shoulder beneath his arm moved in a quick shrug. “I didn’t know if that happened always.”

  “No,” he said. “No, my cousin took a mortal wife.”

  “And she’s not mad? Well. It was…” She sighed. “I didn’t think so, really.”

  “Did your father cause it?”

  “Not to know. She went to his bed willing enough, from what little I did hear, she came out whole, and in the first few years I remember she was…” Toinette searched for a word, shrugged again, and let her hand fall back to her thigh. “Fine. Sad, of course, and ashamed, as an unwed girl with a babe might well be, and even then I think she was jumpy, but we got along.”

  Erik kept his hands steady on her back, not presuming to hold her closely but not wanting to let her go either. After a little while, she spoke again.

  “People see too much. And eight years isn’t such a long time—a woman of twenty-five who looks like a maid of eighteen might pass as merely well preserved. We both know that. When that woman never gets a fever or a cough, never has a bad tooth or a cut that festers…people notice. She notices. When she’s no better than she should be, to start…”

  “There were rumors,” Erik said.

  “There were rumors. She listened. And then there was me. Too strong, too healthy, strange eyes. By the time I was ten, Mam…she went to mass a great deal, and when she wasn’t there, even when she was home, she was often…gone. Sitting, staring at the wall, not moving. For hours. The priests would come and feed her, when one of them was feeling kind. I did it otherwise.” She stopped and swallowed. The green light washed over them again, making sharp lines out of every shadow. “When I transformed the first time, she stabbed me.”

  “God have mercy.” Erik pulled her closer, and Toinette leaned her head against his chest.

  “I can’t blame her now,” she said. “Her child vanished. There was a monster in its place. She probably thought I’d kidnapped her daughter. It was brave, considering. And she was sorry for it when I turned back. But that’s when I thought I’d better leave. I left word with the priests to look in on her.”

  “And you came to Loch Arach.”

  “I did. After a while.”

  He could imagine, and couldn’t imagine, what a while would have held for a girl of twelve, one without the knowledge to control her own transformations, without a known ally in all the world. Erik lifted one hand and stroked Toinette’s hair, half expecting the touch of it to burn him, as though he’d lain his fingers on a holy relic. “I’m glad you found us,” he said, because he thought she might hit him if he said again that he was sorry or called attention to the wetness on her face.

  “Me too.” Toinette cleared her throat. “I never thought I’d tell that. I never met the person who needed to hear it. But I wanted to say it before we went in there.” A jerk of her head indicated the temple. “I wanted to tell you. I hope the knowledge isn’t too great a burden.”

  “An honor, rather,” he said.

  For once, she didn’t make an irreverent reply or try to shrug off the moment. Her embrace tightened, and then she leaned up to kiss him lightly. “Go to sleep,” she said. “I won’t let this place have you.”

  Thirty-Two

  Of course there were dreams, and of course the dreams were far worse than they had been. Even in the midst of the nightmare, Toinette wasn’t surprised.

  The dead wrapped their cold arms around her. They clawed at her flesh, and the wounds opened onto black nothing. Pustules swelled on her body and burst. She saw bone beneath. It shifted in the same liquidly wrong way that the elk creatures’ bodies had, lengthened into spurs and claws, then dissolved again, and the dead slurred in her ears all the time.

  Stinking flesh.

  Damned.

  This is all.

  A dead man’s mouth yawned impossibly wide, as the specter’s the day before had done. Inside was darkness that pulled at her.

  “Piss off,” she said and struck out at it with one hand, forming claws almost as an afterthought. The skull broke under her blow and fell into the hole, which eagerly consumed its own matter. Toinette pulled herself back, shook free of the dead, and woke to more darkness.

  “Well,” she told Erik, listening with gratitude to the beat of his heart beneath her ear, “I’m awake.”

  They ate quickly and got moving. It was just as cold in the morning, if morning it was, as it had been, and the forest looked no different, though the green light had stopped flashing. Walking was warmer. Besides, the faster they went, the quicker they could do what they need
ed and be gone, or die and be done.

  Before she’d been walking long, Toinette was sure either would be better than lingering.

  Onward, in silence, they passed through the stream and into a trackless forest, keeping the temple ahead of them as a goal. For one stretch, the undergrowth would be clear, and they’d make their way around snarls of wood with comparative ease. Then the plants would close in again, and it would be work for swords: brutal, clumsy slashing that left Toinette coated with clammy sweat.

  The sap hardly smelled at all, but she heard faint screams as she hacked at the plants. Occasionally, and worse, she heard laughter.

  “We could change,” said Erik after the first such encounter, “and burn them.”

  Toinette shook her head. “I’d as soon not breathe the smoke.”

  Erik grimaced and made no argument. Changing wouldn’t have let them fly either. The branches above them spiked and twined in a painful mating, almost obscuring the sky. Any attempt to fly out would have brought only mangled wings—and one of Erik’s hadn’t fully healed yet.

  So they went on as humans, tired and cold, walking on ground that at times seemed to fade beneath Toinette’s boots. When it was there, it felt fragile: an eggshell over a monstrously vacant yolk. If she’d thought it would help, she would have screamed. She might have regardless, except she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop.

  When they came to another free patch, she put a hand on Erik’s arm instead.

  He paused, turning his head. “All well?”

  “So to speak,” she said. “Just wanted to make certain I wasn’t imagining you.”

  It sounded ridiculous, but he nodded in recognition. His face was very white: darkness or strain, Toinette wondered, and did hers look the same? Likely. One of the deformed squirrels stared at them from an overhead branch, then chittered in a singsong rhythm, turned a hairless and raw-looking tail, and was gone.

  “If I wasn’t real, my feet wouldn’t hurt.” Erik tried to joke, but neither of them felt like laughing.

  Silently, he turned and they began to walk again.

  The brush closed in before them, and this time it included the blood-drinking vines. With forewarning, they weren’t the menace they’d been before, but they whipped toward Erik and Toinette with a speed as much annoying as disconcerting. No damned plant had a right to be that fast. Toinette took to cursing them under her breath, the words falling into a rhythm with her sword.

  So occupied, neither of them saw the man step out of the forest.

  * * *

  It was a breaking stick beneath the newcomer’s feet that brought him to Erik’s attention; else he might have thought the man another phantom.

  The figure he turned to face, as the last of the vines fell beneath his blade, was short and starvation-thin, dressed in the remains of a leather tunic and breeches. His hair was long and white, his eyes large and dark, and what skin remained to him was ruddy bronze, wrinkled from weather. That was what Erik could have said about the human part of him.

  All else was a sight to inspire profound horror—and deep pity.

  The man was changed as badly as the elk had been. His right leg moved with an unnatural fluidity when he walked, and when the ripped leather parted, Erik glimpsed black void beneath it. Spots of blackness dotted his hands and his face, like plague pustules, but these had no tinge of purple, nor any sense of swollen flesh. It was more as though the man’s skin had opened, and nothing was within.

  In one hand he held a stone knife, but he made no move to use it, nor, at first, to approach. He stared at Erik and Toinette and spoke words in a tongue Erik had never heard before. The tone was universal: desperate, broken hope.

  “Sirrah,” Toinette began, frowning. “I—”

  She stopped as the man took another few steps toward them. The knife dangled from his hand. Erik saw blood on it, but it was gray-red and too viscous. The man spoke another few words, then hesitated; his eyes turned briefly white, but he snarled, what was left of his lips flexing around patches of missing flesh, and shook his head.

  The man looked at their swords, took one step forward, then dropped the knife with no reluctance. On that strange earth he knelt, the mismatched meat and shadow of his body moving in a way that hurt the eyes to see, said another word, and bent his head.

  “It’s all right,” said Erik, though he wasn’t sure it was. “We mean you no harm. You may rise.”

  The man stayed where he was and shook his head. He gestured to Erik’s sword, disintegrating hand shaking, and then drew that hand across the length of his neck.

  “Ah,” said Erik, realizing. He would have felt embarrassed for taking so long to work it out, save that he was feeling too many other emotions, none of them remotely comfortable.

  Toinette was at his side then, her free hand on his shoulder but her own sword drawn. “I’ll do it if you can’t,” she said, “but we must be quick.”

  Erik knew she didn’t speak out of concern for their journey, and he knew his heart was hers at that moment, if it hadn’t been long before. “No,” he said and stepped forward.

  He’d long been a soldier, almost never an executioner, but the stroke was a simple one and the flesh horribly yielding. The body crumpled and the head fell; there was, despite a moment of fear on Erik’s part, no attempt to reattach. Blood didn’t spurt, but flowed sluggishly in a gray-red stream. When he cautiously turned over the head, the eyes were blank, with the look he’d seen on a thousand dead men.

  “Dominus vobiscum,” he said and sighed, cleaning his sword well. “But I don’t think we should stop to bury him. I’d consider it no grace to be laid to rest in these woods myself.”

  “Not much rest either, likely.”

  Erik remembered his dreams and crossed himself. “No.”

  Nonetheless, they laid the man out with his arms folded across his chest, closed his eyes, and placed his head between his feet. The gesture was important, as grotesquely not there as his skin felt and as sickeningly as his limbs bent. Both Erik and Toinette rubbed their hands against their clothing as they started walking again, hoping to clean off any corruption that lingered.

  “I’m glad we didn’t bring any of the men,” Toinette said.

  Erik nodded. “I wonder,” he said quietly, “where he came from. He was no Templar. Another shipwreck?”

  “Likely. Though from no place I’ve been, nor met men from—not from the way he spoke. The world is wide.” She pressed her lips together. “Or he might have been here long enough to forget all language but his own. Madmen do that at times, I hear, and there’s no telling how long he’s been on the island.”

  “Nor how long he was changed,” Erik said, though he wished that the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  The man had kept enough of his mind to ask for death, and not to attack them. Had his eyes stayed white, Erik suspected, matters would have been different. How many years had he spent fighting off bloodlust? How many feeling the corruption take hold of him, looking at flesh that warped into nothing?

  Toinette hacked at a vine, of the immobile sort, and added almost conversationally, “Christian, whoever he was, and more devout than me. I’d have killed myself were I him. Either God would understand, or hell could be no worse.”

  “I’m not sure he could,” Erik said, remembering how the elk had kept coming while stuck full of arrows, and how its not-flesh had mended almost as soon as it was cut. A severing blow, with his whole strength behind it, had been the exception—or had the stranger used the very last of his will to keep away the unnatural healing? Erik thought of the stone knife and the dried blood upon it, the same color as the blood that had come from the man’s neck. “I think he tried.”

  Their footsteps were loud against the trail, punctuated by the swish of blades and the snap of plants. “Poor devil,” said Toinette shortly but with great feeling.

&nbs
p; “No,” said Erik. “Poor—but not yet a devil. He saw to that.”

  He blessed the unknown man for it, but wanted to curse him too, for the thoughts now running the course of his mind. They’d delivered the stranger as much as he had done himself. That was well enough, and Erik didn’t want credit—but the forest, where they could remain themselves with little effort, was only the start of their troubles.

  If the same fate overtook them, was there any salvation, even of the most fatal sort, on the island?

  He doubted it.

  Thirty-Three

  The temple came fully into view, and all else around it faded.

  It wasn’t just by comparison. The trees around the temple were gray and leafless. From their looks, they’d long ago abandoned even such twisted life as the others had possessed. There was no wind, but their branches moved sluggishly against the sky, in patterns Toinette could watch for only a few seconds before the back of her eyes began to ache.

  “It’s just as well we didn’t try flying earlier,” she said, looking back down. “Landing through that—” The thought of even a scratch from one of the branches made her shudder. She and Erik both kept very close and used their swords with thorough care.

  Cutting their way through didn’t take as much effort, despite that. The plants, from wayward moving branches to patchy grass, were all brittle, crumbling at not much more than a touch. The grass was gray too, and the leaves of the plants. That color was more noticeable there, without bark to obscure the shade.

  “I think they’re all dead,” said Erik. “Most likely everything here is. Look.”

  He gestured to the foot of a nearby tree. Toinette turned her head and saw one of the hairless squirrels lying there, though at first she almost didn’t recognize it. Normally that would have been down to scavengers, but as far as she could tell, nothing had touched the rodent—or no animal. It had the same grayish undertone as the grass around it.

  Pits of blackness spotted its skin, though, and a larger one, craterous and uneven, sprouted from its side. Toinette had seen a growth like that on a beggar’s jaw once, but that had been flesh. The…growth…on the squirrel was nothing, void formed into irregular shapes and fastened onto living flesh. The creature’s mouth was open, as if in a scream, and Toinette could see more pitted darkness inside.