Treasurekeeper

by Ripley Harper

  “Yeah, about that—–”

  She steps closer again, points an accusing finger at my chest. “Do you deny the accusation?”

  “No, but—–”

  “We had no other choice, Clara.” Gunn finally decides to say something. “I told you. We needed the slayer for protection.”

  “Nonsense. What protection can a firedragon need?”

  He makes an impatient little click with his tongue, a sound that reminds me, sharply and painfully, of Ingrid. “We’ve been through this. She’s new to her magic and Sonya is completely out of control. We couldn’t take a chance.”

  “A slayer? For protection?”

  “He’s a follower of the Old Words and no threat to her at this point.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the presence of the outcast. There can be no excuse for bringing him here.” She shakes an angry hand at Gunn. “Has she been seduced by the boy? Is that what’s going on here?”

  “I haven’t been seduced by anybody,” I say, annoyed to feel myself blushing. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “So why is he here?”

  “His father was planning to murder him and we had to help him escape. It was a life or death situation.”

  “Not your life.” She scowls. “Not your death. You had no reason to take on that burden!”

  “I couldn’t just leave him to get killed.” I throw my hands in the air, exasperated. “Jeez. Why is this so difficult for people to understand?”

  Her eyes flicker with some complex emotion. “You sound just like your mother.”

  “You knew my mother?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  In spite of the hard, certain look on her face, I immediately know she’s lying. And then I remember something else—–the conversation I had with her father on the first night we met. “That’s not true,” I say slowly, trying to recall exactly what was said. “You did know her.”

  “It wasn’t possible for anyone to know that woman.”

  “No.” I shake my head as the memories slowly return. “You knew her very well. She asked you to become the Green Lady, and you did it. For her sake.”

  “I kept my part of the bargain. She did not.”

  “She lied to you?”

  “All that woman ever did was lie.”

  “I know,” I say. “She lied to me too.”

  The Green Lady raises a questioning eyebrow, but I don’t elaborate. Instead I concentrate on strengthening my shields; there’s a wild and tempting energy to this cave that makes me long to lose myself in my magic, an ancient hum of power so strong it almost creates a real sound. Or is it a movement? A kind of cosmic swaying? It’s almost as if I’m standing on a threshold, a doorway between worlds where the emanations from faraway galaxies—–

  The Green Lady steps closer, putting a stop to my strange thoughts.

  Whoa. Now she’s really invading my personal space.

  “You’re so like her, it’s astonishing. The spitting image.” She reaches out a hand as if to touch my face.

  I flinch away, take a big step backward. “You’re the first person to say that. Most people don’t think we look alike at all.” My mother was dark-haired and dark-eyed and not nearly as tall as I am.

  “That’s because you people stare yourselves blind against the color of a person’s hair and eyes. We look deeper, to the features of the face, the bones beneath the skin.” She tilts her head to the side. “You move like her too. The way you walk, the way you talk, your gestures, your smile…” Her face darkens. “Do you lie like her too, young Jezebel?”

  “My name is Jess. And I don’t lie.”

  “You seem very sure of yourself.”

  “I’m not sure of anything anymore. But I hate lies.”

  “Yes.” She tilts her head to the other side, measuring. “I can see that you, at least, believe that. So tell me honestly. Why should I spare the slayer and the outcast?”

  “Because they haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Next to me, I can sense Gunn’s big body tensing without even looking at him.

  “It’s not what they’ve done,” the Green Lady says, her face tightening with distaste. “It’s who they are.”

  “They can’t help who they are, any more than I can.”

  “You do realize what those two have planned for you?”

  I sigh. “As far as I understand it, the one is planning to kill me as soon as I turn into a monster, and the other wants to impregnate me with his evil seed and then turn me into a mindless puppet so he can suck out my power and use it himself.”

  “And yet you concern yourself with their fate?”

  “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. But they’re both…” I lift my hands in a helpless gesture. “None of us chose our lives. We’re like pieces on a chessboard, set up by other players long ago to make certain fixed moves that have nothing to do with what we would’ve wanted, personally. It’s just the way it is. And I’m as big a part of it as they are, so it’s no use blaming them.”

  The Green Lady stares at me for a few long seconds. Then I watch her shoulders sag. “My God. She did it.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother. She did it. She wanted a fully human dragon and, well—–” She waves one hand as if presenting me to a crowd. “There you are.”

  “I’m not fully human,” I say, my voice flat. “You saw me on that first day.”

  “I certainly did.” The way she looks at me, head tilted sideways, reminds me of a bird. “What do you want from me, Jezebel Sarkany, last living trueborn daughter of the Tenth?”

  “I want you to free Jonathan and Zig.”

  “Done.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She tosses back her hair, an impatient little movement, as if I’m wasting her time. “Now tell me the truth. What do you really want from me? Why did you come here? What were you hoping to find?”

  I glance at Gunn, but he remains stubbornly silent.

  “I guess… A place where I’d be safe.”

  “That’s all?”

  Something about her piercing, bird-like gaze encourages me to tell the truth. “No,” I say, half-surprising myself. “I think I was also hoping to find out who I really am. What I am.”

  “And you expect me to help you with that?”

  “I don’t know. But I hope so. Most of the answers I need lie in the past, and everybody says that you’ve mastered the deep earthmagic skill of Remembering better than anyone alive in the world.”

  “That’s why you’re here? To Remember? Do you have any idea how risky it is?”

  “Not really.”

  She sends Gunn a disapproving look, which he ignores completely.

  “The power slumbering inside you has existed on this planet through the bodies and the lives of many people. The memories of all those people are locked up deep inside you, and although earthmagic can open a window to those worlds and those times, it cannot always guarantee a way back to the life you are living now.”

  “I’m stronger than I look.”

  “Of that I have no doubt.” In the dim greenish light of the cave, the necklace around her neck seems to be moving, coiling around her throat like a snake. “You were born a full-blooded dragon, and I am nothing but a keeper of the dragonflame. Remembering isn’t something I can teach you.”

  “So if you can’t teach me, who can?”

  “You don’t need to be taught. All you need is exposure to a place of power. The magic will come to you without any further prompting.”

  My heart skips a beat. “Are you’re talking about an Initiation?”

  “That’s one of the Order’s many silly labels, yes.”

  “Will you help me to find such a place?”

  She opens her arms. “You’re standing right in the middle of one. If your blood is as pure as they say, you merely need to let down your shields and the memories will come to you. All you have to decide is what you most want to know.”

  “I want to know if
I’m evil.”

  The words leave my mouth without thinking, as if they’ve always been there, just waiting to be spoken.

  Again that strange, bird-like turning of her head. “Surely you’re the only one who can know that.”

  “I’m not talking about me. The person standing in front of you now. I’m talking about this… thing… inside me.”

  She frowns. “You think it’s evil?”

  “I don’t know. But girls like me have been murdered and tortured and slayed for thousands of years. Why would they have done that if we didn’t have something evil inside us?”

  “I think you have your question,” the Green Lady says. “All you need to do is hold it in your mind while you lower your shields.”

  “Really?” I ask, suddenly wary. “Is it that easy?”

  “For one such as you, yes.”

  “And you want me to do it now?”

  “There’s no time like the present.”

  I glance uncertainly at Gunn, but he’s staring straight ahead, his jaw stubbornly set.

  Well. Maybe if I lower my shields just a—–

  Chapter 9

  On the first night she knew she loved him, she woke up crying.

  In the darkness, her lord put his hand on her narrow back. “Tis but a nightmare, my lady.”

  But she shook her head, her cheeks hot with tears.

  Even on her wedding day, her mother had warned Coblaith never to love her husband. For everyone knew that Lord Fergal, ruler of the Darklands beyond the Northern Mountains, was descended from a family of sorcerers and that the people of those lands still honored creatures from stories and legends: wicked beings unsaved by the blood of Christ’s holy cross. A woman who fell in love with such a man would come to no good end, her mother had told her. And bearing his sorcerer’s children would surely mean losing her place in heaven for all eternity.

  Coblaith had shared some of her mother’s fears, for she had been raised to fear God and to hate the devil in all his many guises. But in a world where lord battled against lord, chieftain against chieftain and king against king, she was also grateful that her supremely practical father had promised her hand to the one lord whose lands had never been ransacked by invaders and whose castle remained more secure than even that of the high king himself.

  Partly, Lord Fergall’s good fortune was due to the landscape, for the Darklands was protected by towering mountains on one side and dangerous rocky beaches on the other. But whispered rumors also warned that terrible things happened to those who dared enter those lands uninvited: winter storms would descend from clear skies on summer days, calm seas would rise to swallow whole fleets, and monstrous creatures would appear from the mists, terrifying beasts that could speak, and fly, and breathe fire.

  Coblaith would make the sign of the cross when listening to such tales, but at the same time she could not help but notice that Lord Fergall was uncommonly handsome and vigorous—–unlike the high king, whose dried-up, groping hands and ancient, leering face made her skin crawl.

  Coblaith married Lord Fergal on a fine spring day, and although she rode away secretly reveling in the envious looks her silk garments and fine new steed provoked, her face was stern and unsmiling, for she had promised her mother never to love her husband so that her soul might be saved from eternal damnation.

  But it turned out to be surprisingly difficult not to love a man whose touch heated your blood and warmed your heart. And what woman could resist a man who ruled with such good judgment that his lands thrived, his peasants grew fat, and his keep held more riches than the high king’s castle?

  Not a woman like Coblaith, that’s for certain.

  As time passed, however, a dark smudge of anxiety began to stain the brightness of Coblaith’s newly married happiness. For once a month, on the full moon, her lord would leave their warm bed in the dead of night to go on a secret errand of which he would never speak afterward, no matter how she begged.

  Never one for mystery, it did not take long before Coblaith bribed a stable boy to provide her with her own swift steed and secretly followed her lord on one of his midnight expeditions. Through the woods they went, deeper and deeper, until they eventually reached a strange and eerie place: a clearing in the trees that opened to reveal a dark lake fed by a rushing waterfall. From where she hid behind a copse of trees, Coblaith sensed the wrongness of this place immediately, but nothing could prepare her for what she was about to witness: a monster rising from the deep, its great winged body glistening with a hypnotic light so beautiful it had to be evil. And then—–holy mother!—–the dragon stepped out of the lake and her lord, with all the unreasoned logic of a nightmare, sat down at the great beast’s clawed feet, and spoke to the evil beast even as the beast spoke to him.

  Hiding in the darkness, Coblaith bit her thumb, overcome by emotions that were too complicated for her to examine honestly. What mystery had she stumbled upon? What kind of man had she married? And what path should she choose going forwards, now that she knew that all her mother’s dark mutterings had been true?

  For weeks afterward she waited, trying to decide what her next move should be. But then one night she woke from a dream and she knew, without a doubt, that she loved a man who talked to dragons, and she cried with her mouth open as her lord’s hand rested gently upon her narrow back.

  Fergal soothed his wife until she fell into an exhausted sleep. Since that night when he had allowed her to follow him into the forbidden woods, he had watched her closely, looking for signs of betrayal, or hatred, or disgust. But when he had seen only confusion and sorrow in the eyes of the woman who’d stolen his heart so irrevocably, he knew he had come to a crossroads from which there was no turning back. On the one path lay his love for his mother, and his gratitude toward her, and his fear of her. On the other lay his love for his beautiful southern wife, and his loyalty toward her, and his hopes for the child that was growing in her belly.

  He stayed awake for the rest of the night, trying to decide where his true allegiance must lie. And when the first morning light peeped through the windows, he woke his wife and told her everything, disobeying his mother’s wishes for the first time in his life.

  In the deepest heart of the forest, Fergal told his wife, his mother and his sister lived, far away from prying eyes. Partly this was a choice freely made, as they loved all living things and could not bear to be confined by dead wood and iron and stone. But it was also a form of exile, for they had to hide their true nature from the fear and superstition of the world of men.

  “The women of my family are different from other women,” Fergal said solemnly, deeply aware that by uttering these words he was betraying a sacred trust. “More beautiful and more powerful and more terrifying.”

  “Terrifying?”

  “Yes. Terrifying. For this is the truth: my mother and my sister are women and dragons both, and so has my grandmother been, and so have all her great-grandmothers since time immemorial.”

  Coblaith bit her thumb, an endearing nervous habit that she was quite unaware of. “How can it be possible to be both a dragon and a woman?” she asked after a moment’s thought. “Surely a person must be either one or the other?”

  His wife’s composed voice and sensible question immediately put Fergal’s heart at ease. He had married well. There would be no fainting spells or hysterical ravings from this one.

  And so he explained that although the women in his family began their lives as ordinary girls, they took on the shape of dragons once their mothers died and they themselves had given birth to children who could carry forth the magical blood that flowed in their veins. For verily, it was the power slumbering in the blood of the dragons that had protected these lands for generations on end.

  “But surely such unnatural beings must be creatures of evil!”

  “No, my lady. The Christian priests are wrong. Dragons are not creatures of evil but beings of great good that have brought only blessings and happiness to these lands and the peopl
e who live here. It is they who ensure that the harvest is plentiful and the livestock fertile; it is they who turn away the great storms and bring rain in times of drought, and it is they who keep our people safe by confusing and terrifying invaders by illusion and deceptions.”

  Coblaith’s voice remained calm even as her eyes narrowed. “Are you praising these creatures because you are one too? If you truly are the son of a dragon, will you turn into such a beast one day?”

  “A dragon is no beast!”

  “You evade my question, husband.”

  “If you ask whether I will ever take on the shape of a dragon, the answer is no, for it is only the females in my family for whom such transformations are possible. However, if you ask whether I will ever remain the man you see before you now, the answer must likewise be no, for on the death of my mother, I shall inherit such powers from her as to make me a ruler worthy of these lands.”

  “Pray make your meaning plain, my lord.”

  Fergal sighed, anticipating that his wife might not appreciate the truth she sought so eagerly. “The power of a dragon is passed on from mother to child upon the mother’s death,” he explained, “and equally divided among her offspring. On my mother’s death, my sister and I will thus each inherit half of the dragon’s power, so that I will be able to wield magic as easily as a dragon does even while retaining my human shape.”

  His lady shuddered at his words, but whether it was because she feared for her immortal soul or because she was moved by the idea of such great power, she could not say.

  “And my children? Will they inherit the dragon’s power in turn?”

  “Whatever power I inherit will be passed on to my daughters and sons in equal measures upon my death. However—–”

  She did not allow him to finish. “Will my daughters then be dragons too?”

  “No,” he reassured her calmly. “Only from a dragon’s body can a dragon be born.” He smiled tenderly. “And you are no dragon, my love.”

  “So my children will not take the form of dragons, but they shall inherit whatever magic you yourself inherit from your mother, upon your own death?”