Highland Dragon Warrior

by Isabel Cooper

  Unless something else went wrong.

  With the slow clumsiness of a badly wounded animal seeking shelter, she crawled under the blankets, curled on her side, and shut her eyes.

  A door opened. Moiread didn’t know what door at first. That it was a door and not a tent flap meant she wasn’t at war, but otherwise she was lost. She made a questioning noise.

  “I’ve brought food,” said a voice—male, Welsh, pleasant. Madoc. Memory came back. Her vision focused a little too.

  “The girl?” she managed.

  “She said the man was thin, shorter than me but taller than the innkeeper, unshaven but not bearded. Dark hair. She thought dark eyes as well, but he was wearing a robe with a hood. He’d a chain around his neck too.”

  “Could be half the men in town.”

  “That he could,” Madoc said, his words echoing and distorting. “I doubt the man has lingered about the place either. In his shoes, I’d have had a horse waiting for me and been a good mile out of town by the time we realized there was anything amiss.”

  “Unless…” Moiread said, and then stopped. There’d been an objection. She’d been thinking of it. Now it was gone. “Damn.”

  “Oh, he may have waited to see if his plan worked. It’s possible. But I doubt he lingered. Drink.” His wavering hand set metal to Moiread’s lips. She opened her mouth. The ocean washed in, drowning what Madoc said next.

  Men in plate were marching—clank, clank, clank—and she had to go and meet them, the English, keep them from her home. Why was she lying in bed? Her men would be waiting. She went to rise, and a hand on her shoulder pushed her back down.

  “No, not for a while yet,” said Madoc, and his voice cleared her head. He held meat to her mouth. Moiread chewed and realized that the clanking sound from before had been knife against platter. “It’s working fast, the poison.”

  Moiread swallowed and nodded. “Everything’s fast for us. Save age. I never understood that.”

  “And it’s likely no time for either of us to try. Meat and water… Shall I keep bringing those, or will you need other things?” He fed her as he talked, but paused to let her answer.

  “Those will do.” She stretched her mouth into a smile, pulling the muscles out and up in each direction. “It’s a siege, aye? You lay in supplies, and then you wait for it to pass.”

  * * *

  Madoc had seen people poisoned before—not often, and often not intentionally—but easing pain was a tricky matter, and one sort of berry often resembled another. He’d seen the confusion, the blurred vision, the sight and sound of things that weren’t there. When Moiread’s limbs shook, or when she lay with flushed face and glassy eyes, Madoc worried, but he felt himself on familiar ground.

  Other things were not familiar at all.

  On the second day, helping her drink another goblet of water, he felt heat coming off her when his hand was inches from her skin. Carefully, Madoc pushed back Moiread’s tangled hair and touched fingertips to her forehead. Her skin was like a fresh warming pan—not hot enough to blister him or set fire to the sheets, but far hotter than any fever, even a deadly one, would explain.

  He called on the saints in a whisper, crossed himself, then picked up the goblet again.

  Madoc ate his own meals rarely, grabbing slices of bread and meat when he went to the kitchen after Moiread’s food. Gradually he trusted the girl, Jillian, to guard the room for short intervals, but never more than a few minutes. He never had her bring food, and he slept, uneasily, in a chair beside Moiread’s bed.

  Her hand on his bicep wakened him from one such doze. Everything was dark around them—it must have been after midnight—but her eyes glowed like a cat’s. The pupils were round, though, and huge, almost swallowing the witch light of her irises. Her hand was hot iron. “You. Madoc. Please.”

  At once he stood and moved to her side. Her hand slid down his arm to his wrist, and her fingers grasped tightly. “What is it? What can I do?”

  His first and deepest fear was that she’d been wrong, that she was dying after all, but her voice was strong and lower than he was used to.

  “Talk.”

  “Pardon?”

  Her pupils had been too large a moment ago; belladonna did that. Suddenly they were far thinner, though just as long. Madoc thought of snakes. The blue-white glow from her eyes was far brighter than before. “The body fights. Old tactics. Doesn’t understand why not. Not now. Not here. It doesn’t know.”

  Sharp pain lanced through his wrist. Madoc looked down. He’d never noticed Moiread’s fingernails, but he vaguely remembered them as short, sensible, as fit a woman with plenty to do and most of it physical.

  Now silver-gray claws pierced his shirt and his skin. As he watched, they blurred and went away, and it was a woman’s hand clutching him.

  “Give me words,” she said, her eyes still glowing. There was a blurring all around her, a sense of potential. “Keep me human.”

  Understanding brought with it another sort of fear, and so, as Madoc nodded, he began with the first words that came to his mind: “Pater noster qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…” He stopped. “Will Latin be all right?”

  “Will be fine.” She chuckled like a rusty blade coming from its sheath. “I speak a few tongues. Any will do.”

  And so he prayed, and then spoke of his father’s priest when he was growing up, and how the man had been known for his temper but patient enough with a lad who’d constantly asked questions and wanted to hear stories of saints and miracles. That led into the story of Saint David, and how a hill had risen up under him while he was preaching, and the festivals in Wales on his day. By the time Madoc had exhausted himself on that subject, Moiread had fallen back into an uneasy sleep. With her eyes closed, it was harder to tell, but the sense of impending change had gone. She looked like any other woman on a sickbed.

  That night was the first of many such incidents. Madoc bandaged his own wrist, pulled his sleeves tight to cover it, and told Moiread about Branwen and the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” recited poems, and sang songs he’d heard from his mother or troubadours or drunken guards. Once a forked tongue flicked out of her mouth while she listened; another time, silver scales appeared across the bridge of her sharp nose, like unearthly freckles on her pale skin.

  “If you need to change…” he said during one of those moments. “If it’ll help, I can perhaps get you far enough outside the village—”

  “No.” When she opened her mouth, her teeth were pointed. “You couldn’t. Not wi’ so much motion, so many smells. And…” She hissed in a breath. Her hands clenched on the bedsheets, and the fangs disappeared. “If I change when I’m ill, it’ll be easier to get lost to instinct. To… Well, I’ll no’ do it around so many people.”

  Her meaning was impossible to miss. Madoc didn’t raise the subject again.

  None of the later trials was as bad as that first night, perhaps because both he and Moiread were better prepared or perhaps because the poison, and her body’s defenses, had peaked in those dark hours. Gradually the shifting stopped, but Madoc kept up the stories and the songs. Moiread seemed to rest easier with them, and he felt as if he was doing something when he spoke, even if it was only distracting her.

  He wished he knew more of physicking. Bleeding might help, or herbs, but he’d no training in such matters even where humans were concerned, and Moiread wasn’t. Madoc watched the too-shallow rise and fall of her chest as she slept, put cool cloths on her forehead, fed her, and made himself eat.

  The body fights, Moiread had told him. In the night, as she slept or muttered rambling commands to phantom armies, Madoc wondered if hers had given up, if remaining in human shape was a sign that she’d surrendered to the poison.

  Those thoughts made sleeping even harder and left food sticking in his throat.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, with no p
reamble, Moiread opened clear eyes, shook her head, and sat up with no apparent trouble. “God’s teeth, but I’m glad that’s done with. Worse than childbed, or so I hear.” She looked at Madoc, who sat staring at her, and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m in your debt, sir.”

  “No, for it’s my fault,” he managed.

  “I’m sure someone would have tried to poison me on my own merits one of these days,” Moiread said. “You stayed. And you helped. It speaks well of you.” She climbed out of bed, a touch clumsily and weakly for her, but not at all what Madoc would have expected from an invalid. “And now, I suggest you sleep. I’m going to go see if there’s any chance of a bath.”

  Seven

  They left two days later, early in the morning, once Madoc had gotten a chance to sleep and they’d both been able to make inquiries in town about the “beggar.” Surprising neither of them, they got few answers. One man, who sold chickens close to the tavern, said that he’d found a robe wadded up and shoved under his stall. By the time he spoke to Madoc and Moiread, he’d long since sold it to the ragman.

  “But we can assume,” Madoc said, “that they or their master are magicians.”

  Moiread blinked. “Can we?”

  They traveled a main road now, wider than those that had taken them from Loch Arach, and so as they talked, they both kept an eye out for anybody who might overhear. Just then, they were the sole travelers in sight, but they kept their voices low in case—as much as that was possible when talking on horseback.

  “The beggar was only present the one night. He had the poison ready, and he didn’t act long after we came in.” Madoc reined his horse right at a fork in the road, then went on. “Now, I suppose he may have been watching all the taverns, in various guises, but that doesn’t seem likely. Nor do I think that my enemies had a man at each inn: a rather frightening prospect, if the case.”

  “Aye.”

  “So then. Either the man knew well in advance where we’d be and when, or he’d followed us from Loch Arach to Erskine without either of us sensing him. I won’t say I’m such a woodsman as to make that impossible, but between the two of us, I would believe we’d have spotted any man without unearthly assistance.”

  “I like to think so,” said Moiread dryly. She stared off into the hazy blue sky, thinking while she enjoyed the sun on her face and the fact that the world stayed steady and real in front of her. Few things beat illness for bringing life into focus, though she’d not advise belladonna as an experience.

  “We can tell the future a bit,” she finally said, “but only in the castle, in that room you saw, and then it’s weather or land or illness. Large things, and not with their own will. To foretell the actions of two people…I’ve never heard of that done.”

  Madoc nodded. Riding in the sunlight, with the wind ruffling his short black hair, he did a fair impression of a hero in a tapestry, or mayhap a saint on a stained-glass window. His face had that sharp ascetic’s appearance, particularly when he frowned in thought. “With people, the future is never certain, or so my few studies in the area have taught me. You can find a likely moment at best, and the more specific, the more likely it is to go wrong. Our enemies may have taken that chance. Or”—he looked around them, then over his shoulder—“they may have trusted in human eyes, only hidden them from us.”

  “If they’d entered the castle so, we’d have known it. But they may have suspected as much. There are stories.”

  “I know.” Madoc smiled quickly. “One day at our leisure, perhaps you’ll tell me which among them are true.”

  “A few more days like these, and I’ll have nothing left to tell you,” said Moiread, laughing. Then, reluctantly, she turned back to serious matters. “They’d have waited outside the castle, then, until we left. Could be done. And I could almost pity the poor bastards doing it, had they been on a less murderous errand.”

  “I have heard of such enchantments,” Madoc said, “though I know no spell to counter them.”

  “I might be able to see the magic, if not the men. But I can’t manage it through the illusion”—Moiread gestured to her artificially flat chest—“nor can I do it on horseback. And meanwhile I’ll be no good in a fight.”

  “Could you teach me the way of it?” Madoc asked.

  “Aye, I think so. Or at least I know no reason why you couldn’t learn it, save that I’ve never taught anyone magic before, and I doubt I’ll do it well. It’s a spell, though, not a gift of my blood, so any man could try.”

  “You could do it when we stop for a meal, if there’s nobody else around us. Until then, I’d lay odds we’ll be safe. The man behind all this may know by now that I live, and he may have set men on our trail again, but it must take them some time to catch up. Unless they had a band waiting in Erskine.”

  “Or he truly can see the future and set wee clumps of assassins all along our path. Although then he’d have seen in advance that the first one wouldn’t work, and why bother with him then?” Moiread shook her head. She was glad for many reasons that seeing the future didn’t often work. Not least of those was that trying to reason it out gave her a headache.

  “And my thought is that they’d have tried to strike by now in the first case, and it will hardly matter in the second. Indeed, if my foe is a man powerful enough to see so far and so finely into the future, and wealthy enough to hire many killers, it says that my quest is either hopeless or very important indeed.”

  “Nothing says it can’t be both, you know,” said Moiread.

  “I do.” Madoc looked off into the distance, watching the gray-green hills on the horizon. The metal of his mail shirt and the hilt of his sword glinted as he rode. His tunic was red as garnets or heart’s blood, and he sat his horse with gracious ease, though they’d been many hours in the saddle already. Quietly, he said, “I had believed that if I went without a troop of men or much state, I would pass unnoticed, or no man would know my task well enough to want it stopped. I had hoped.”

  “Aye,” said Moiread. She recognized the tone of his voice. She’d heard it from her father, those few times when his plans had been baffled, and from her captains after ambushes gone awry. She’d used it herself often in the long months between Falkirk and Bannockburn. “And now—”

  “Now I have all the more reason not to turn away,” Madoc said. “But if you say I’ve dragged you into danger unwarned, I’ll not blame you.”

  “I agreed to guard you, and I assumed those I was to guard you from had a bit of skill at their craft. And I’ve spent a year or twenty at war, aye, and risking my neck more than I’ve done as yet.”

  Madoc smiled. “Then I thank you again, and I promise I’ll be as apt a student as I can.”

  * * *

  “You’ll only have to do this the first time,” Moiread said. She sat tailor-fashion on a flattish stone. The brook at her side rushed loudly, swollen with the spring rains. “After, it’ll just be a matter of saying the words. It’s a compact you’re making, like most spells, though I’ve not heard of anything coming in person to agree. Too minor.”

  “It’s rare that they do,” Madoc agreed, “or at least rare that they show themselves for it.”

  Magic, or most magic, was a matter of talking directly to the forces of the world: the spirits of those forces in the oldest tales, the demons or angels governing their spheres in more modern lore. All spells invoked, most indirectly. Madoc had never been present for an actual summoning. When he was thinking sensibly, he was glad of that. Everything he’d learned said that even the holy ones would frighten the bravest man.

  “Good,” said Moiread, evidently sharing his thoughts. “Here.”

  She held out a twig of yew, dark needles and bright-red berries attached. In the last village they’d passed through, Moiread had taken them by a churchyard and stopped long enough to break the twig off the tree, which, as in many villages, grew by the gate.

&
nbsp; “Now,” she went on, when Madoc had taken the twig, “hold it up and repeat after me.”

  Slowly Moiread began, in Latin as good as any priest’s. “In the names of Gabriel, Amariel, Nargeron, and Almighty God, I call upon you, O powers of the worlds. I invoke you, and by invoking, I command you to grant me sight of the union of the spheres. Part the veil that blinds mortal eyes and give me to see the subtle workings of the world, now and whensoever I should invoke it again.”

  As Madoc followed her lead, he felt power gathering. It wasn’t much—as Moiread had said, this was a minor spell—but the earth and the air both shifted, as if he could feel them being drawn slightly toward the yew twig. The twig itself began to feel both heavier and less present. Madoc was half worried that his fingers would go through it. In the sun at midday, it was hard to see, but he also thought it glowed.

  Moiread nodded. “Now crush the berries. Close your eyes, and smear them on your lids.”

  The sliminess Madoc had expected lasted barely a moment. Then it turned to a cool tingling across his closed eyelids and, in another heartbeat, vanished. His skin felt untouched.

  “And open.”

  Madoc did, and caught his breath. He was no stranger to magic, but never had he been able to see the whole world through such entirely different eyes.

  A faint haze hung above the grass and trees, a paler shadow of their natural green. The rocks and road looked normal, though their colors were deeper than they had been a moment ago. Madoc looked to the horses, peacefully cropping new grass a few feet away, and saw that each of them glowed a shade of brown: the steady darkness of wheat bread for Moiread’s horse and a slightly lighter color for Rhuddem.

  Madoc raised a hand in front of his face. His fingers shone red, shot through with streaks of silver. He flexed them, and the colors shifted accordingly.

  “By God,” he said. “This is truly a lovely art you’ve shown me.”