Highland Dragon Rebel

by Isabel Cooper

  The first thing was to get the lay of the land. Visio dei, he called, summoning back the spirits that he’d banished to fight Antonio, and what they revealed made him wince.

  In magical sight, the dragons looked as though they fought in the middle of the night sky, or were two colliding thunderstorms, a flashing field of darkness surrounded each, overlapping as they clashed. Although they’d looked physically about the same size, the shadow around Antonio was far larger. Whatever that meant for dragons, Madoc was certain it didn’t bode well for Moiread.

  She screamed in pain. Madoc couldn’t have said how he knew it was her, but he did, and his whole body turned to ice. Almost instinctively, he drew his sword and thrust it above him with one hand.

  The pool shone opalescent around him. It held power—mostly for Elian’s line, but Madoc had gotten far enough into the ritual that at least a little came to his call. The sword was a conduit, linking him with the sky and both the water and the magic it held.

  The powers were already there.

  Madoc wanted to cry out incoherently: Help her, save her, please, knowing only a blind and desperate rush of emotion, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Magic demanded precision. The spirits, or angels, or whatever the beings he called on, were extremely literal creatures, and he would be sloppy with their power at his own risk—and Moiread’s.

  He mastered his feelings in a moment of savagely applied will, clamping down hard on everything but perception and intention. If his body had been icy with fear, so too did his mind become cold: a spear of stark, chill facts, with all of his heart gone to fuel the spell itself.

  “Go to the aid of Moiread MacAlasdair,” he said in Latin. As he spoke, he watched Moiread struggle above and pictured her as well in her other form: naked beneath him, armored and fighting at his side, laughing and thumping the table across from him, dancing with him in Gilrion’s court. The dragon was only one of her faces, and he knew in that second that he loved them all. “Help her defeat Antonio and stay alive. Go.”

  Power spiraled up from the water, twisting around him and climbing up the sword to spread into the sky like reversed lightning. Shapes followed it, beings of light that Madoc, even in visio dei, could only half make out. He felt his own strength being drawn with them.

  That was well.

  * * *

  A glimmer of light at the sides of her vision was all the warning Moiread got. Nor did she heed it at the time. She was fighting desperately, lashing her neck away from the red dragon’s seeking jaws, trying to pull herself free of its grip before its claws found her guts.

  Then light hit them, bright enough to dazzle her, but from the sound of it worse for the red, for Moiread found herself abruptly out of its grasp. She couldn’t see what assaulted the other, but it roared and flamed and slashed, not at her but at enemies she couldn’t see, ones that paid seemingly no attention to her.

  Whatever they were doing to the red, she saw no wounds, nor did she know how long their attack would last.

  She thought, for the first time, about giving the red a chance to surrender, or to fly away.

  But she’d seen a little bit inside its head when it spoke. She knew the feel of it, the cold hunger for power, the view of humanity as animals for the slaughter. If she let the red go, it could fly away to shape another land to its selfish whims—or it could come back in fifty years, all that callousness turned to vengeance.

  Moiread spread her wings and flew upward, letting a thermal lend her strength. Before the red could break free of the shapes attacking it, she folded her wings and dove.

  This time, her jaws closed around its spine. This time, the angle was right. She heard the cracking sound she’d wanted.

  All the same, she bit down hard as she bore the red to the ground and tore her jaws away bloody.

  It was always best to be sure.

  Forty-one

  However long he lived, Madoc didn’t think he’d ever forget the moment when the two dragons landed: Antonio a still-bleeding corpse that shook the ground with his final impact and, far more important, Moiread bearing him to earth and then circling to land a shade less heavily. Her sides were heaving, her wings beating slowly, but she was alive.

  Madoc pulled himself from the water and ran toward her with a strength he wouldn’t have dreamed he possessed a moment before.

  When he reached Moiread, she was a woman again, though her eyes were glowing and there was a line of scales along each of her cheeks. Neither mattered. Madoc was only glad that she was human-sized-and-shaped again, that he might the more easily throw his arms about her and pull her against him.

  She embraced him just as enthusiastically, before both of them pulled back at the same moment.

  “Are you well?” Moiread asked.

  At the same time, the words mingling, Madoc said, “I’m sorry… Are you injured?”

  “No,” she said, and kissed him. If she minded the condition of his clothing, Moiread gave no sign, any more than it occurred to Madoc to mind the blood spattering her body. So long as none of it was hers, he was happy.

  Their condition, not to mention the setting, was enough to keep them from doing more than kiss, and that was as well. As they parted, Madoc heard a quick intake of breath from behind them.

  “Hello, lass,” Moiread said calmly, stepping away from Madoc to face Bronwyn, then shifting her gaze to Elian, leaning on his daughter’s arm. “Best we get your father back to the keep, aye? The guards’ll have gotten your brother there long ago, and he’ll be wanting to know we’ve all come through in one piece.”

  “I… Yes.” The immediate task kept Bronwyn from asking questions for as long as it took to transfer Elian into Moiread’s arms.

  In the process, they got a glimpse of his flesh where the fire had seared him. From Elian’s ankle to his heel, his skin was an angry red, blisters rising in many places. “You should be all right, my lord…with care, if nothing festers,” Madoc said cautiously. “The sort of burns that kill are…darker.”

  “Aye. It could have been worse,” said Moiread. “Though this willna’ be any pleasure trip, and I’m sorry for it.”

  “You’re a woman,” said the lord, looking up into Moiread’s face. “Madoc’s servant Michael, but…a woman.”

  “Aye, my lord. Seemed more practical, for the road and all.”

  “And a—”

  “Dragon. Aye. Long story, I’m afraid.”

  Moiread started walking as they spoke, and Madoc, following behind them and Bronwyn, noticed how smooth her pace was, how Elian’s weight barely slowed her at all, and yet how carefully she held the injured man.

  There were so many pieces to her: the strength and the care, the creature who’d broken Antonio’s spine and the woman who gently bore the wounded. Before Madoc had known her, such different elements might have seemed an odd combination. Now they blended into one another, grew out of each other like solid trees sprouting from the yielding earth.

  Lost in thought, he almost missed Bronwyn’s question. “And Signor Antonio? He was a…a dragon too.”

  “Aye,” Moiread said again. “There are a few of us, here and there. I couldna’ tell you how many.”

  Bronwyn looked back over her shoulder, past Madoc, to where the red dragon’s corpse had become a man’s robed form, neck bent at an angle that none could survive. She said nothing.

  “Did you know?” Elian asked.

  “No, not until he changed.” Madoc could only see the back of Moiread’s head, but he thought it shook slightly back and forth. “Nor did he know what I was. He was…verra old, my lord, even as we measure age, and his blood ran not nearly as mortal as mine. If he’d not transformed, we might have passed each other by completely. I wonder why he did, in the end.”

  “My fault, I think,” Madoc said and described briefly the spell and his invocation of visio dei. “When the spell and the pla
ce and the vision combined, I suppose anything within that circle had to assume its true shape. He was more dragon than man, you said.”

  “Certainly that’s how he thought,” said Moiread. “I know he was your adviser, my lord, and I’m sorry for the loss of the man you think he was, but if he valued you at all, it was as a farmer prizes his best pig.”

  “Ah,” said Elian, and sighed.

  Bronwyn sobbed—once, and then again, standing still and making broken little sounds.

  They both turned toward her, but it was Madoc who spoke first. “Did you know?”

  “Not what he was. I swear. But…I… He said it was the only way…” They waited, silent, and then she looked at Madoc and wailed. “I didn’t want you dead once I met you!”

  * * *

  The next few minutes were awkward, to say the least.

  Because God was either merciful or ironic, the need to get Elian back to the castle at least kept them from standing around staring for long. Rather, it kept Moiread from standing around staring, and all the others followed when she started walking.

  In her arms, Elian was rigid from more than shock. Madoc was silent. Bronwyn wept quietly as she followed. And Moiread—

  —she was too tired to know exactly what she felt. She knew the aftermath of battle well, and this was the same, even if they’d all come through alive. Tasks lay ahead of her. She could feel once she’d gotten them done.

  They walked up the road, a strange and somber procession. The keep was none too far away. Doubtless, men were arming themselves and preparing to ride to their rescue. The whole fight had really not taken much time at all. That was how they went, generally.

  “Tell me everything,” Madoc said calmly. “From the start of it.”

  Bronwyn did, in a tear-choked voice but more coherently than Moiread might have expected from a girl her age. “I never wanted the alliance. If we had it, I thought we would be that much more likely to go to war, and it never seemed worth it. And I didn’t understand the spell, but the English have magic too, I’ve heard, and wouldn’t it just provoke them? I was very…outspoken about that. Signor Antonio found me after an argument. He agreed with me in every particular. He was sympathetic. He said he’d take care of the matter.”

  “And did he say how he’d do that?” Madoc asked.

  “No. But—” A great sniffling breath. “I knew. I knew. Especially when he began disappearing, or when he’d shut himself in his workroom and not want to be disturbed. I knew he meant to kill you, or I’d have asked.”

  “Likely he was the man you saw in your vision,” Moiread put in. “Iestyn mentioned the scar on his neck, just before Antonio changed.” She made as much of an apologetic gesture as she could with her head alone. “I’ve been a wee bit distracted since then.”

  Madoc laughed, though the mirth in it was sharp and dark. “So you might say, yes.”

  “I didn’t want to kill anyone,” Bronwyn said, “but I didn’t want a stupid war either. And he kept asking if I still wanted him to ‘see to things,’ and I said—”

  “‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’” Madoc quoted. “Only rather the other way around, yes?”

  “I… Yes. I’m sorry. I thought it was one man, one that I didn’t know, against my people. My brother. I thought Antonio was a man, and not… I’m sorry,” she said and began to cry again.

  That was when the first outriders reached them, their faces pale and their eyes wide under their helmets. Staring followed, and questions. They had the wits to send back for two men and a litter to carry their lord, and for the messenger to take Bronwyn with him.

  “Michael?” asked Alan, one of those who stayed behind. He was gaping at Moiread, his gaze shifting from the blood on her clothing to the curves beneath it.

  “More or less,” she said, and then the giddy humor of a battle’s aftermath sprang up in her, and she tipped him a tavern maid’s sly grin. “More and less, aye, depending on where you look.”

  The group of them was laughing—carefully in Moiread and Elian’s cases, near-hysterically in all of them—when the litter bearers came.

  * * *

  From the time they entered the castle, Moiread stuck close to Madoc’s side. Those who weren’t taking care of their lord stared at her, but she gave every appearance of not noticing. She flatly, albeit politely, refused the offers of clothing more suited to her status or a place to lie down. She did take the sword Tomos offered, a replacement for the one she’d left in the meadow when she transformed.

  “There’s some chance,” she said, during one of the rare moments when she and Madoc were alone, “that we should make a run for it now.”

  Madoc knew what she meant. The two of them were the only witnesses to Bronwyn’s confession. They were also in Elian’s keep, surrounded by his guards. A dishonorable man would use the latter to solve the former problem. Madoc had enough faith in Elian to shake his head at the suggestion, but it yet worried him.

  Thus Moiread stood behind a screen while Madoc changed into dry clothing. He pretended to avert his eyes while she stripped, washed off Antonio’s blood, and put on a hastily scrounged gown, and they both ignored the maid’s subtle sounds of disapproval. Both ate, but Moiread took food first and waited, and each stood guard while the other got a few hours of sleep.

  The castle was like a roadside camp, but with enough witnesses that, even if they had the energy to speak at length, they couldn’t have talked about anything important. When the page came the next morning, calling them to Elian’s chambers, Madoc blessed the hour.

  Elian lay on his stomach, looking weary but better than he had the day before. At one side of his canopied bed stood Father Evan and Bronwyn, the latter with her head lowered and her hands clasped in front of her.

  Nobody knew what to say at first. Nobody knew where to look. Between Bronwyn’s shame, Elian’s injury, and the minor but present incongruity of Moiread, standing like a half-wrapped statue in badly fitting brown wool, awkward glances ruled the moment.

  “I am glad to see you so well, my lord,” Madoc finally said.

  “I thank you.” Elian cleared his throat. “Best to settle matters between us as soon as we can, yes? My household has committed great wrongs against you. What atonement would you ask of us?”

  The man’s face was firmly set, but Madoc could read fear in his eyes, and no wonder. By rights, Madoc could have asked for Bronwyn’s execution, at the least. He sighed. “We all live. Antonio is dead. Let it be an end.”

  “Your generosity shames me.”

  “You have always been my father’s friend,” Madoc said, searching his weary brain for the right words, “and I hope you will be mine as well. Perhaps in time we may discuss your son’s marriage to one of my nieces, if you wish. I fear I cannot now countenance the one you and my father had planned.”

  “No,” said Elian, “of course not. Bronwyn will be leaving in a month. She will spend five years in France, serving the sisters of Abbaye-aux-Bois. With God’s grace, she will learn from that.” He cast an eye at his daughter, who flinched.

  Madoc might have pitied her, had he not remembered the tavern in Erskine and Moiread’s delirious gaze. “She did save me at the last,” he said, finding refuge in facts. “For which I am thankful.”

  “There is that. And now—” Elian beckoned the priest forward. The man held out a small chest, carved of fine wood and inlaid with gold. “I know I cannot be part of the rite until my body is whole again. Let me swear friendship as I can. In this chest is the jawbone of Saint Eluned.” He placed a hand on the lid and took a breath. Madoc felt the subtle rise of power around them. “On it and before God I pledge my friendship to Madoc ap Rhys and Moiread MacAlasdair. Let God’s wrath fall upon me should I, or any of my house, cause them harm by action or inaction, by word, deed, or thought. Amen.”

  The feeling of binding, of a spell complet
ed, accompanied his last word. Madoc knew that he’d given them at least a night’s sleep, and he stepped forward to perform his half of the oath with a good heart. With that alliance, and the remnants of the rite, he could raise the shield from his own home, and perhaps it was best that way.

  “Then it is done,” said Elian, “and I may rest easy. I bid you both farewell, as I doubt I’ll see you before you take your leave.”

  Doubt, he said, but Madoc heard the command beneath the words.

  Forty-two

  Morning meant leaving. Moiread had barely needed to exchange two words with Madoc to settle that. He knew what she did: safe they might be, and she gave Elian credit for the oath, but welcome was another matter.

  She was glad to have slept before they left, and to eat one last meal that wasn’t tavern food, but Moiread was also glad to know that the road was in front of her. Soon the castle walls would no longer confine her, nor would she have to ignore stares from all quarters.

  Many of the guards had been quite decent. Iestyn had clearly had trouble getting his head around the notion of a girl who fought, but enthusiasm had quickly won out. Madoc took more than equal place in his regard now, and that was fine. With luck, Moiread’s example—and a few stories of Scathach and Boudica that she’d related—would leave the boy more flexible than most of his generation.

  Still, she was a woman. She fought. She’d been involved with a strange matter out by the pool, one that had left Antonio dead. A few people had seen great winged shapes in the sky. At least one had talked. The main story held that Antonio had turned into a dragon, but only that Moiread, Madoc, and Elian had defeated him. Other rumors, and speculation about what power one had to have to kill a dragon, ran rampant.

  The maids flinched whenever Moiread looked displeased. When she went to lead Shadow out, the groom stood well back from her.

  Yes, she’d be glad to get away.

  Shadow himself was disposed to be nervous. Moiread couldn’t be too surprised; she’d practically transformed on his back. She kept a tight hand on the leading rein and watched him warily as she checked her saddle.