‘What is it?’ He asked, noting the way the old dragon clasped the latest book tight to his scaly chest, almost as if he were trying to hide it.
‘This,’ Sir Frynwy said after a long pause. He held out the book for Benfro to take. Its cover felt strange, almost warm and as he took it from the old dragon, Benfro thought he could hear whispering voices, like an urgent conversation in the next door room. Then as Sir Frynwy let it slip fully from his grasp, Benfro nearly dropped the book he had just been given. It was as heavy as if it had been made of stone. Astonished, he looked up at the old dragon’s distraught face.
‘Ah me, what a fool I am,’ he said. ‘It’s the Llyfr Draconius. It was here all along.’
Benfro held the magic book tightly in his grasp, wishing it would wash away the spell that Frecknock had cast on him that morning. He wanted to shout that she had taken it, that she must have sneaked in as the meeting began and put it where it would be found. His mouth stayed shut, clamped by a force he couldn’t overcome. All he could do was seethe as Frecknock looked on at his frustration and Sir Frynwy’s mortification with an air of malicious glee.
~~~~
Chapter Eleven
Proud sheep in the house of hazel and thorns,
Fey white-foot exiled from the ruined hall,
The blood of the north and the blood of the south,
Mixed will turn both to dust.
The Prophecies of Mad Goronwy
Darkness had almost completely fallen by the time Benfro made his way home. The trees silhouetted against the grey-black sky were like the skin-stripped skeletons of mythical beasts. As the wind pulled them back and forth, it seemed like they still lived, tethered cruelly to the earth, thrashing to break free. Trapped by Frecknock’s spell, he could well imagine the torment they might feel, desperate to explode with the truth yet shackled and bound by forces he could not even see, let alone understand.
It had been a poor feast, after all the anticipation. There was general relief amongst the villagers that the book had been found, but Sir Frynwy himself, after apologising in person to each of the villagers in turn, had retreated to his house. With no telling of the great histories to look forward to, the party soon broke up. And even before then it had been a sombre affair. Ynys Môn had tried to lessen some of Sir Frynwy’s shame by telling all who would listen of the time he had managed to become entangled in one of his own traps, hanging from a tree for three days before he was rescued, but on the whole it had been a quite miserable evening. Only Frecknock seemed happy, telling all who would listen how she thought it was time someone else took over the guardianship of the book, someone young and with all their faculties about them. Benfro had avoided her as best he could, going from dragon to dragon trying to tell them what he had seen and what she had done to him. Each time the result was the same. He could talk around the subject but as soon as he tried to say exactly what had happened, he seemed to lose the ability to form words. After a final embarrassed conversation with Meirionydd, he had made his excuses and left.
No moon shone and clouds obscured the stars so that the darkness was almost total. He had chosen to walk through the forest, still unsettled by his encounter with Frecknock on the path that morning, but he could have made the journey home blindfolded. He knew the woods around the village better than anything, each tree and bush, animal track, spring and grotto. The ground underfoot was soft with dead leaves and each footfall brought a whiff of autumn decay to his nose. Winter would soon be here.
The smell of burning wood was the first sign that he neared home. Then he caught a glimpse of light through the thinning undergrowth and minutes later he was stepping quietly through the almost empty vegetable patch. There would be a lot of work to do preparing the beds for the winter crops and digging in last years compost. It struck Benfro as he walked that none of the villagers grew any of their own vegetables. As far as he was aware, only Ynys Môn hunted regularly. And yet they always had food, and exotic food at that. Even that evening’s sombre feast had seen a good spread of mutton and beef, venison and turkey. And there had been flatbreads flavoured with roasted nuts and garlic; steamed asparagus tips as thick as his thumb and yet still tender and sweet; platters of fruits that he had eaten a thousand times before and yet never seen growing in the forest around the village. The other dragons had drunk mead and wine, though none would let him try any. Benfro had no idea where they got it from. But what bothered him more was that it had never occurred to him before.
‘So Sir Frynwy had the book all along,’ Morgwm said to him as he stepped into the house. She was sitting in her favourite chair by the fire, a steaming bowl of tea on the table beside her. Benfro had been about to ask about the food, but as ever she had said the one thing that could knock him off his train of thought. He fell back on his earlier trouble with Frecknock. As far has he was concerned, she was the villain of the piece, not Sir Frynwy. She had stolen the book, then hidden it in his study where he would be most embarrassed by its recovery. She wanted it for herself so that she could spend her days looking for a mate.
‘How did you know,’ was all Benfro was able to say. Something of his internal conflict must have shown on his face, as his mother looked at him with her penetrating stare that could be either kindly or cruel depending on what he had done.
‘Sit, Benfro,’ she said, pouring some tea into a second bowl and handing it to him. He could smell the sweet mixture of chamomile and honeybark, a gentle sleeping draught best used to aid the rest of those too exhausted or unsettled to relax. He took the bowl, letting the heat of the brew warm his hands, and sat down beside the fire.
‘How do the other villagers get their food, for the feasts and stuff?’ He asked. It was the first of many thoughts that were swimming around in his head and he eyed the tea with suspicion. Was his mother trying to make him sleep and forget?
‘Ah, so you’re beginning to turn you curiosity to good use,’ Morgwm said. ‘Why do you suppose that we grow all our own vegetables and eat meat only when you or Ynys Môn are successful at the hunt?’
‘I don’t know,’ Benfro said. It was all part of the same puzzle, he realised. But he could make no sense of it.
‘As to how I knew about Sir Frynwy,’ Morgwm said. ‘You’re home too early for there to have been a telling. Sir Frynwy is a trained bard, he lives for the tale. If he has not made one this night, then he is deeply troubled. I can only imagine that he is more than a little embarrassed at calling a village meeting, accusing all his friends of theft and then discovering that no crime had occurred in the first place.’
Benfro couldn’t help thinking that there was more to it than this simple piece of logic. He might have come home early for a number of reasons, although right then he could think of none.
‘I think someone really did take the book,’ he said, surprised that the words had come out exactly as he had intended.
‘You do?’ Morgwm’s gaze caught his eyes, looking deep into him as she always did when she wanted to know whether or not he was telling the truth. ‘Who?’
Benfro tried to say Frecknock. Her sneering face was at the front of his mind and he could hear the mocking tone of her voice. But he could not speak her name.
‘I… I don’t know,’ he said, frustration boiling to anger inside him. ‘Why would s… someone want to take it anyway? What does it do? I held it. It was heavier than it should have been. I heard voices. What is it?’ The questions came boiling out of him in a cascade. His mother just sat and stared at him with her calm, piercing eyes, waiting patiently for him to finish. When finally he fell silent she took a long sip of her tea. Without thinking, Benfro did the same, the hot sweet liquid soothing him in an instant.
‘I suppose you’ll need to know sooner rather than later,’ Morgwm said at last. ‘Though it’ll be a good few years yet before you’re ready to read the book yourself. You’ve touched it and felt something of its power. It’s spoken to you too, if what you say is true. It sees potential in you.
&nb
sp; ‘The book is an artefact as much as a source of knowledge. It contains the wisdom and skill of countless dragons. But it’s not like the books you’re used to. Reading it is not a simple task undertaken lightly. If you were to try, you would understand nothing and likely lose your mind before you had finished. Try to read it unprepared and it will read you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Benfro said. ‘If it’s so dangerous, why keep it at all?’
‘Because it’s a little part of what we once were. And because it’s a source of great power. You asked where the villagers get their food from, why we have to grow our own and they seem to be able to pluck theirs out of thin air. Well, the knowledge contained in the Llyfr Draconius allows those with the skill to reach out and bring things to them from far away. The beef you ate this evening was probably raised somewhere in the lower Hendry. The slaughterhouse where it came from will put the loss of a carcass down to the Fairies. Men are much happier making up complicated explanations for things than facing the truth.’
‘Men? Men give us food?’ Benfro asked.
‘Not give, no,’ Morgwm answered. ‘We take. In time you’ll learn that it is not unnatural or inexplicable. You’ll probably master the skill yourself. But not tonight.’ She smiled.
‘If you can just take food,’ Benfro asked, certain that whatever any of the villagers might do his mother could also. ‘Then why do we dig the field outside every year? Why do I have to hunt for deer and boar in the forest?’
‘That’s the heart of it, Benfro,’ his mother said, smiling again. ‘And it all has to do with men. I know Ynys Môn has told you something of them, and Meirionydd too. You’ve seen the ruins of Ystumtuen too. You know that once, not long ago, we were hunted and killed for our jewels. The king paid aurddraig – dragon gold for any dragon’s head presented to him at court. Do you know why men stopped killing us?’
‘Ynys Môn told me he saved their king from being killed by a great tusker,’ Benfro said, enthusiasm getting the better of him before he realised he might be getting his old friend in trouble for telling him too much.
‘He simplifies things, as ever,’ Morgwm said. ‘But that’s essentially true. King Divitie never had much enthusiasm for the aurddraig anyway. He was tutored by the Order of the Ram, the travelling monks, and they’ve always been more open to foreign ideas than the other orders of men. Some of them used to come to me for advice on healing.
‘There’s something you must know about men, Benfro, though I hope you never meet any. They’re duplicitous, scheming, always seeking more power. And they’re quite ruthless. They kill their own kind with scarcely a thought, so it’s not difficult to see how they would treat something as different to them as a dragon. They’ve a basic skill for the subtle arts, too, but like everything else they do it’s a brutalised and violent skill. No dragon could conjure a blade of fire. Using the power of every living thing to maim and kill is an affront to the natural order. Yet this is one of the first skills they teach their novitiates in the Order of the High Ffrydd.’
‘Order?’ Benfro asked, not wanting to break the flow of information, but desperate to understand it as best he could.
‘Men worship a god they call The Shepherd,’ Morgwm said. ‘Don’t ask me why, they just do. In the twin kingdoms there are three religious houses or orders, the Order of the High Ffrydd are the Warrior Priests. They were charged with the extermination of all dragons, but over time they’ve become little more than a powerful army for the king. I’ve told you of the Order of the Ram. They’re travellers, learning and teaching as they go from place to place. Of all the men I have met, they’re the most open. Then there’s the Order of the Candle. These are the bureaucrats, the petty-minded little men who make rules to keep the people in line. When Divitie stopped the warrior priests from killing our kind, the Order of the Candle stepped in, making rules to define how we were to be allowed to live. Dragons can’t use the subtle arts, we must not live together in groups of more than four, we must not breed save with a licence from the king and our kitlings must be presented to the court in Candlehall within a year of their hatching. And we must pay a tithe to their treasury every year.’
‘But…’ Benfro started.
‘Yes, I know,’ Morgwm said, smiling again. ‘We pay no heed to their laws. And why should we? But we do have to be careful. If they knew how we flaunted them, then they’d hunt us down again. I fear that soon they will do so anyway. King Divitie is long dead, his son after him. King Diseverin is a weak-minded fool not long for this world and his daughter, Princess Beulah, poisoned her own sister so that she might gain the throne for herself. And she is a creature of Inquisitor Melyn, head of the Order of the High Ffrydd. When she comes to the throne it is likely her first decree will be the reinstating of the aurddraig.
‘So we come back to the village. If men knew it existed they would destroy it. But as long as it exists then the dragons who live there are free to live their lives unhindered. Each of them has chosen to settle there and they are protected by an ancient and powerful spell. For that spell to work, one must live outside the wards, to act as a gatekeeper, if you like. That’s my role. Men searching the forest will always end up on the track that leads here. They’ll find a cottage where a lone dragon healer lives, with her vegetables and herbs and wise advice for any who would seek it. As long as I live here, the village is safe.’
Benfro took a sip from his bowl and realised that it was empty. He could feel the warmth of the draught in his belly, working its way up to his head where it would soothe him to a gentle sleep. But for now his mind was buzzing with all that he had learnt.
‘And the Llyfr Draconius?’ He asked. ‘How does that fit in with… with everything?’
‘It’s only what it could do, should it fall into the wrong hands,’ Morgwm said. ‘Someone with little skill attempting to perform some of the spells within its pages might easily draw unwanted attention to themselves. And that might break the spell that protects the village. That’s why you must promise me, Benfro, by Great Rasalene himself, that you’ll never try to read the book alone.’
‘I promise, of course,’ Benfro said, fascinated and horrified in equal measure. He still longed to know the secrets contained within the Llyfr Draconius, but something of his mother’s innate caution had rubbed off on him. He could wait a while longer now, knowing that he would find out in time. But Frecknock was meddling around with magic now. And whilst she had been learning from Sir Frynwy and Meirionydd, Benfro couldn’t help thinking that she was not as skilled as she would like to think. He longed to tell his mother about her, but her one successful spell had locked that terrible secret inside him like a maggot in an apple.
*
‘No doubt the boy’s mother tumbled with a Llanwennog she met on the road.’
Melyn watched as the gathering of rough villagers massacred a dance that had been popular in Candlehall high society some twenty years earlier. ‘Or it could have been one of Balch’s servants. We’re not that far from Ystumtuen you know, and by all accounts the woman Hennas was a travelling healer before she settled here.’
‘But he’s the spitting image of Prince Balch,’ Beulah said. ‘And look at him. He’s thin and spindly where his mother’s heavy set. He’s still just a boy yet he’s a good handspan taller than her. I don’t think he’s her son at all.’
‘Beulah, you see plots and intrigue at every turn. The boy has Llanwennog blood but there’s no more to it than that. Prince Balch died not two months after your sister. You know as well as I do that he couldn’t have fathered another.’
‘But he’s thirteen, Melyn,’ Beulah said. ‘That’s exactly how old Lleyn’s child would’ve been, had it survived.’
‘Which it didn’t,’ Melyn said calmly. The boy in question was wheeling inexpertly around the dance floor with a very pretty young woman in a long green dress. She aroused his interest far more than he did. Had she been a boy he would have selected her for his Order in an instant. He could see the potential
in her like a glowing flame. The poor girl probably heard voices in the night and had strange premonitions that often came true. Perhaps she even managed to make things happen just because she wanted to. In a backward place like this she would inevitably be accused of being a witch. If she was lucky she might be able to scratch a living out on the forest fringe, away from people. But she would soon go mad with the voices. If she was unlucky she would be stoned to death or burnt at the stake before she reached twenty. It was a terrible waste of a talent, but the Order of the High Ffrydd was an exclusively male domain. On the other hand, there was always a place for a willing domestic. And who knew what she might do in exchange for a little knowledge and power.
‘How can you be sure?’ Beulah’s voice cut across his idle musing.
‘Because I inspected the dead body,’ he said. ‘Your sister hadn’t even managed to give birth. The child was dead inside her.
‘I still don’t like it,’ Beulah said.
‘If it makes you any happier, I’m going to probe his mother about him anyway, just as soon as she’s had a few more drinks,’ Melyn said. ‘There’re only two candidates here worthy of choosing and he’s one of them.’
‘But he’s only thirteen,’ Beulah said.
‘So much the better,’ Melyn said. ‘I can keep him apart until he’s old enough. By the time he turns fourteen he’ll belong to me. And with those looks he’ll make an excellent spy.’
‘Very well,’ Beulah said. She looked out across the party. ‘And the other one?’
‘The boy Clun has potential, even if he is a bit old.’ Melyn said. ‘And he’s bold. He even came and asked me about the choosing. I’ll take him, too, before Padraig gets his hands on him.’
Beulah laughed a little, unpleasant snort.
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