by Dragon Lance
She smiled at him. “No, Father, please come in.”
Kemian Ambrodel was a handsome elf of some four hundred years. From him Vixa had inherited her fair coloring and her introspective nature. Verhanna was more likely responsible for Vixa’s temper and strong will.
Her father pulled up a chair and sat down. Without preamble, he stated, “I want you to make peace with your mother. She was nearly mad with grief when we thought you lost. She blamed herself for everything. When you came back, it was as though she lost a century off her age.” Kemian brushed a hand through his daughter’s fair hair. “She sees so much of herself in you, you know.”
Vixa took his hand. “I always wanted to be more like you.”
“After all you’ve been through, you can’t deny that you have your mother’s courage and passionate nature. She and I are very different, yet here we are, married all this time. No one thought it would work.”
“She married you after you bested her in a duel!” Vixa said indignantly. Kemian’s almond-shaped blue eyes twinkled, and she added, “Very well, Father. I’ll take what command she offers – but I need some time to rest and reflect.”
“That’s fine. Verhanna won’t object to that. It will be good to have you close to home for a while.”
Vixa slept in her own bed that night. Her dreams were filled with a kaleidoscope of images: Armantaro’s familiar face; the battle for Silvanost, fought side by side with Gundabyr; and most strongly of all, the endless sea. She dreamt she was racing through the waves in dolphin form. The sensation was so powerful that she awoke breathless. Coryphene’s words came back to her: “You are a sister of the sea now. The call will be irresistible.”
Rolling over to a more comfortable position, Vixa banished the ghostly echo from her mind. Sister of the sea? No longer. Not here in Qualinost.
*
Vixa spent the remainder of the summer in the city, home with her parents. Her sleep continued to be troubled by dreams of the sea. To divert herself, she composed a long letter to Samcadaris, which she sent by the simple expedient of tying it to Lionheart’s saddle and sending the griffon home.
Summer heat gave way to the gold-and-red chill of autumn. Vixa assumed command of the Wildrunners, the rangers of Kagonesti ancestry who’d served Kith-Kanan so well during the Kinslayer War. Her duties kept her in the northern woods for many weeks at a time. After her adventurous summer, she thought all she wanted was the peace and quiet of a remote outpost, yet she never felt at ease in the forest, not as she once had. Her nights were more disturbed now, the dreams of the sea frequently leaving her agitated and unable to sleep.
Winter was gray and silent, as woodland winters usually are. Vixa spent nearly a month sick with fever, hot bricks in her bed to ward off the chills. She talked wildly in her delirium, raving about Urione, Nissia Grotto, Naxos, and other things that confounded the healers. Her fever would lessen for a short time, but hope was dashed as the illness took hold of her once more. At times they despaired for her life, but she was young and strong, and by the time the snows melted, she was on her feet again, unusually thin, with dark hollows beneath her eyes.
The arrival of spring brought a courier from Qualinost. Among the other papers he carried was a strange letter addressed to Vixa. It had come, so the courier told her, when a griffon appeared over the city. The beast dropped a small scroll, upon which was written Vixa’s name. The letter had finally found its way to her, deep in the northern forest.
Vixa untied the silk cord that bound the scroll. Tiny, elegant Silvanesti script filled the page. The letter read:
To Her Royal Highness
Princess Vixa Ambrodel
Greetings:
I regret not being able to respond sooner to your letter, but my duties have kept me quite busy. I am no longer marshal of Silvanost. That honor has fallen to Eriscodera, whom you met as a colonel last summer. An unlikely alliance has grown up between Eriscodera, Lord Agavenes, and the Speaker’s wife, Lady Uriona. They have opposed the Speaker’s attempts to restore contact with Qualinost. I fear Silvanost grows ever more insular. The Speaker has told me he hopes to abdicate in favor of his nephew. Uriona will oppose that, of course.
I trust you are well, Princess. Though it saddens me to say it, I sometimes feel all our fighting was for naught, as we are ruled by Uriona anyway. At least the succession is assured and the line of Silvanos will continue. I remain
Your friend,
Samca
A shudder ran through the Qualinesti princess. Perhaps Uriona’s prophecy had been right all along – at least in part. She had indeed been crowned in the Tower of the Stars, and now occupied the most ancient elven throne in the world.
Vixa put a hand to her head, attempting to massage the ache from her temples. The pain would not go away. It had been with her, off and on, for a week.
She called her lieutenant. “I’m turning over command to you,” she told him, writing out her orders on a scrap of parchment. “As of today, you lead the Wildrunners.”
The Kagonesti was stunned. “By why, lady? Is your health still poor?” he asked.
“No, but I can’t stay here. If I do, I’ll go mad.”
She packed a single cloth bag with a few necessities, as Kerridar stood by helplessly, at a loss to explain his commander’s sudden departure. “What shall I tell the Speaker? What shall I tell your mother?” he asked weakly.
“I’ve left letters for them. They’ll understand.” She didn’t intend to bandy words with Kerridar all day. “I’ll probably return some day to visit, but I’ll never command the Wildrunners again. You’re a good soldier, Kerridar. I’ve been proud to serve with you.”
She gripped his hand, ignoring his bewilderment. Vixa tied her bag to her saddle and mounted. The chestnut horse fretted in a circle. “Good-bye, Kerridar,” she called.
“Fare you well, Lady Vixa. Astra go with you!”
She rode for days, stopping only for the horse’s sake. The rest periods had to be brief, because whenever she stopped, the ache in her head grew unbearable. Once she was moving again, the pain would subside. She avoided roads and villages, not wanting to meet anyone. By the evening of her third day of travel, she arrived at the ocean shore. There was nothing before her now but sand and rolling waves.
She unsaddled the horse and took the bridle from its head. “You’re free, too,” she said, giving the animal’s rump a slap. The chestnut cantered away, snorting and shaking its head at the unaccustomed lack of restraint.
Her headache had gone away, as she knew it would. In its place were unintelligible whispers. She couldn’t understand the words, but she knew what they signified. The voices wanted her to come into the water. Vixa dropped her bag on the sand and, like a sleepwalker, headed for the surf. As she went, she shed her clothing.
Though summer was more than a month away, the water felt warm and indescribably good. She dove headfirst into the waves, swimming out beyond the line of breakers. A last glance back at the beach, and she sank beneath the surface. She kicked her feet until they were feet no more. Never had the transformation been so effortless and so welcome. Faster and faster she coursed through the depths. Now she could understand the voices. They said, “Come, Sister. Come home. Come home.”
Before she’d gone half a dozen leagues, she was surrounded by dolphins. The sea brothers greeted her by name as they cavorted around her.
“Why did you call me?” she asked in the water-tongue.
“Our brother, our chief, commanded it,” they replied.
Her heartbeat quickened. “Naxos?”
“Naxos, yes. Our brother, our chief,” said one mottled gray dolphin. “He sent us to tell you that we have left the city. We have no home but the sea now. Come with us, Sister! Be consort to our brother, our chief!”
“What has become of the Quoowahb of Urione?”
“They have a new master, but we are free. Come with us, Vixa Dryfoot!”
The pain and fatigue of her journey dropped away like a
soiled cloak. Happiness filled her heart. Naxos was calling her. She would be free to roam the oceans, to live in peace. She would not have to fight wars or serve any master but nature itself.
She turned her dolphin body away from the land. “Take me to Naxos,” she said to her brothers.
Night of Falling Stars
(ca. 1435 PC)
Everyone said that it wasn’t my fault, what happened when I was fifteen. No one said, “If Ryle had only been faster... if he’d only been stronger...” No one said that my father would be alive today if I’d seen the boar in time, if I’d shouted louder – if I’d not been fear-frozen and unable to draw bow and loose bolt in time. But I knew the truth. I’d had a long way home to Raven that hot summer’s night, riding one horse and leading the other, the little bay mare who carried my father’s torn and broken body. It had been a night of falling stars, bright bits of light streaking across the black sky, showering the darkness like tears fallen for the truth.
The boar had gored my father and mortally wounded him, but it was my fear that killed him.
When I grew up, people named me Ryle Sworder because, in the ten years since my father’s death, I’d honed my fighting skills as if they were teeth and claws, and then I put them up for sale. Likely you’ll say it’s bragging, but I’ll tell you anyway: There were few better swords for hire in this part of Krynn than mine. People said, “Never worry that Ryle Sworder will run away scared from robbers and freebooters. And he’s not afraid of goblins, either, nor of any beast in the forest.”
That was so, as far as it went. I wasn’t fearless, as folk said. The terror that haunted me was this: That someone would again die of my dread.
I chose my work in order to pit myself against the terror and defeat it, like a boy afraid of ghosts and eager to go whistling past every graveyard he can find, just to prove that he isn’t afraid at all. After a while, I began to believe that I’d done a good job of forgetting the old dread. There came a time when I didn’t think I was whistling past graveyards when they paid me to escort tender virgins and their dear dowries through the forest to the wedding feast, or to shepherd wealthy old men down the river past lurking robbers to kin. After a while, I thought I was just doing an honest job of work. I didn’t know that fear isn’t laid to rest until it is forgiven.
When I wasn’t hired out, I lived at the tavern in Raven, in the small chamber above the common room. In those days the village wasn’t more or less than it is today – a crossroads jumble of wine shops, inns, taverns, and smithies gathered round the best ford across the Whiterush River where it winds through a narrow valley at the feet of the Kharolis Mountains. One summer I fell in love with golden Reatha, the ferryman’s daughter. As I loved her, she loved me, but by winter she was telling me that there wasn’t enough room in my heart for her and the ghostly past.
“Let it go,” she said, sad and sorry. “Ryle, hunting accidents happen. Please let it go.”
Talk like that stirred up the deep-buried dread, the old guilt. I had some stake in not wanting to rouse those, and so I argued with Reatha as if she were telling me to forget my father. She tried hard to make me understand what she meant. I tried harder not to hear her. We didn’t stay together past midwinter, but we watched each other from a distance. My eyes could find her across a crowded street; hers could find me in the dark.
*
The tavern was called the Raven’s Rose, named for the village and for the twining white and red roses that covered the wooden walls enclosing the tavern’s garden. The rose bower sat behind the marching ranks of turnips and carrots and potatoes and beans and beets, and it belonged to Cynara Taverner, tended over all the years since she was a child. This was the kind of garden they tell about in songs, and you got to sit yourself down in the comfortable wooden chair, or on the stone bench against the rose-tapestried wall, only by invitation. I enjoyed that bower from time to time, for I had a good friend in Cynara. A widow, she would have married my father, the widower, if he’d survived the hunting trip with me. She’d been looking after me with a mother’s eye since my own had died, and she kept on doing that after my father’s death. She said, “Bad luck and boars can’t change how I feel about you, child.”
One day in early summer, I sat in the rose bower dozing to the sound of the flower-drunk bees, when the gate behind me opened, the bottom hinge squeaking as it always did. A dwarf strode into the garden and banged the gate shut behind him. He came and stood before me, in that head-back way that dwarves have even when you’re sitting and they’re standing and everyone’s comfortably eye-to-eye.
The dwarf asked if I was Ryle Sworder, and I told him I was. He didn’t do more than grunt to acknowledge the answer.
“Who wants to know?”
He told me that he was an old friend of Cynara’s and that his name was Tarran Ironwood, then he went and sat on the bench by the wall. It was a lovely bench, crafted by a master stone-wright from whitest marble, a relief of twining roses worked on the sides and the legs. Most people stopped to admire it, even those who saw it often. Tarran Ironwood didn’t give it a glance. He sat himself down and stared at me.
Studied, I studied back. His face was pale, his black beard trimmed and glossy. He was whip-thin and of good height for a dwarf, about heart-high to a middling tall human. He had the well-heeled air of Thorbardin about him, and he looked to be in his early middle years, which means he was about ninety or so years old. Thin as he was, he was hale enough, but he was missing his right arm. A brooch of gold and emeralds, shaped like a dragon winging, pinned up the empty sleeve.
“What do you want, Tarran Ironwood?”
“I came to see you.”
A great shout of laughter thundered out from the tavern, a dozen voices raised up in hooting derision. Someone cried, “The dragon! Oh, aye, tell us all about it – and the story’ll be told for the hundredth time this year!” And the storm of laughter rolled around the Rose again, splashing out into the garden.
The dwarf sat still on the stone bench among the roses, head cocked and listening.
“Have you never heard the tale, Tarran Ironwood?”
He nodded. “I’ve heard it. There’s a copper dragon lives under the mountains, far away and down where even we of Thorbardin don’t go. Claw, they call him.”
A warm breeze stirred among the roses, rousing a heady scent you could almost see.
“That’s the one,” I said. “Though I’ve never heard the part about his name – or even that it’s a him. Anyway, the rest of the story says it – he – sits on a treasure mound the size of the Rose, and they say the dragon’s not the worst of what you can find down there.”
“There, the story is wrong.” Tarran touched one of the sculpted roses on the side of the bench, traced the shape of a marble petal with a finger, stroking the overlying softness of greeny-gold lichen. “Claw is the worst of what you can find under the mountain.”
Tarran sat very still, and the afternoon light glittered on the gemmed brooch where his arm used to be. All that shining made it seem as if the small emerald dragon were alive and breathing there on his shoulder.
“You’ve seen that dragon,” I said.
“I’ve seen him. Twenty years ago.” Tarran sat still as stone, but for one finger tap-tapping on the stony rose. “Tomorrow I’m going back.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You want to kill him, right?”
That was a joke, of course; everyone knows it takes a few armies to kill a dragon. But Tarran took the jest soberly, just as if I were serious.
“If I could kill the beast,” he said, “I wouldn’t. I want revenge, and a longer one than Claw’s death would give me.”
I stopped smiling. “And you’ve got this revenge all planned out?”
“I do. And maybe you think it’ll be a cold revenge, coming this late, but it took me a long time to stop screaming in my sleep.”
Screaming in terror, howling down the long night.
I looked away from him and his admission
of fear as you look away from a deformity, pretending to the politeness that common sense says is kinder than staring at the maimed and making him feel self-conscious. What common sense says, and what the gesture really is, are two different things. In some deep place within, often as not folk see injury or deformity as illness, something that might be catching. So it was with me and any confession of dread.
But one-armed Tarran didn’t seem to care if his fear was too ugly for me to see – it was his, and he owned it. He sat forward on the bench, his elbow on his knee, his dark eyes glinting.
“Ryle, Cynara says your sword is for hire. And the word around is that when you’re hired, you stay hired, and you won’t run off because you’ve killed me and robbed me – or because you haven’t got the heart to see a thing through.”
“Word’s right,” I said. “There’s no future in either.”
He took the dragon brooch from his empty right sleeve and tossed it to me. I caught it, and got lost in the brilliant green of the emerald wings, the wink of light in the ruby eyes.
“That’s the least of what treasure is under the mountain, Ryle Sworder.”
I tossed the dragon brooch back. The gold and emeralds and rubies shone like an arcing rainbow between us. His right shoulder twitched, as though his body couldn’t forget what used to be true. He’d been right-handed before he met the dragon. But he recovered in time, and caught the brooch in his lone left hand.
“As you see,” he said, smiling for the first time, and grimly. “I need a hand. If you come with me and help me get my revenge on the dragon, half of everything you and I can carry out is yours.”
I decided quickly, as I always do.
“My sword’s yours,” I said. “And since you’re Cynara’s friend, I’ll not haggle over the fee.”
That was a joke, too, but Tarran had already smiled once that day and didn’t see the need to indulge again. He said we’d leave in the morning, and he didn’t say anything else. After he left me, I sat alone for a long time, all the way into the dimming and beyond to twilight. Twice I heard Reatha’s voice – once lilting in laughter, once couched in quiet confiding tones as she and a friend walked past the garden on the other side of the wall. I closed my eyes and imagined how she’d look dressed in treasure from the dragon’s hoard, a golden chalice in hand, a diamond necklace spilling all down her breast like water running.
