Adrian

by Heather Grothaus

  “I think you’re right,” he said, happy to temporarily forsake all thoughts of the island for the attentions of the woman who had so completely consumed him in such a short time. He reached his left hand down to skim her leg to her knee, readying to flip her over onto her back, and then caught sight of Dragon, lying in the near corner. Her yellow eyes were trained on the cold hearth, which she had again left upon Adrian’s arrival with Maisie.

  The thoughts came unbidden to his mind, cooling his passion.

  Dragon is small . . .

  If Wyldonna’s treasure is as vast as the tales tell, she couldna hide it verra well, could she?

  He recalled seeing Cairn at the entrance to the mountain cavern: Such a large opening would require a large guard. . . .

  “Maisie,” he said flatly.

  “Mmm?” she murmured, nuzzling him and reaching her hand down, impatient for him.

  He’d been all over the castle. No, the plans hadn’t made sense, and yet he’d found the secret doors, the hidden chambers behind the walls and beneath the floors.

  They’d even gone so far as to pull up the floorboards in the chamber.

  Adrian’s eyes flicked to the thick carved beams along the ceiling, supporting the tightly seamed wooden boards. Then he looked back to the small creature curled in the corner.

  Dragon was watching him.

  “Maisie, get up,” he said, pushing her off him.

  She gave an offended huff as Adrian threw his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for his chausses.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Where are you going so suddenly that you would leave me in such a state?”

  He pulled on his boots while his mind raced. “Nowhere.”

  “You’re getting dressed,” she pointed out. And then, in a more indignant tone, “The shirt, too?”

  He gave her a grin as he stood and pushed his head through the opening. She was sitting upright in the bed, her breasts bared and rosy. Good God, there was nothing so delicious on the earth as Maisie Lindsey. He leaned forward and braced his hands on the mattress to kiss her mouth firmly.

  “One moment,” he promised. Then he pulled away from the bed and crossed the floor to the hearth, where he crouched down.

  The opening was perhaps not quite three feet tall, although it was a bit wider than that. Still, it would be a tight fit. He ducked and leaned his head inside to look up and saw nothing but narrow blackness.

  His mind went to the images of the plans of the castle, and he considered the floors that were missing from the drawing in the book, the orientation of the tall ceiling of the corridor beyond the chamber door. He swiveled on his heels to face the room and then brought his left foot back to brace himself as he tucked into the opening.

  “Adrian, what are you doing?” Maisie demanded from the end of the bed, where she’d crawled to watch him.

  He winked at her. “Back in a thrice,” he said, and then stood up in the tight space.

  The sooty air immediately closed around him, as if he had been buried alive, the residual heat from countless fires emanating from the stones that were only inches from his skin—and seemed to draw closer as he reached up. Adrian could feel the familiar tightening of his chest, but he forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose—in, one, two; out, three, four—as his hands crawled along the crumbly, sticky prison.

  Then he felt it. Shallowed by years of smoke, the depression was just deep enough for Adrian’s fingers to hold to his first knuckle. He reached a bit higher with his other hand and felt the next. He braced his back against the stones and stepped up against the chimney, wedging himself inside. And then he began to climb. Two handholds, four, eight, until his next scrabbling reach met not a warm stony depression but a smooth, greasy surface, inset in the chimney itself.

  Adrian rapped on it with the backs of his knuckles, and although the sound was spongy, it was still hollow. He pushed with first one hand, then both, but the barrier didn’t yield. And so he shimmied up the chimney until his feet were on the bottom lip of the partition. Drawing back his right leg until his knee was beneath his chin, he kicked.

  The barrier gave the faintest whisper of movement.

  He kicked twice more, and on the last effort, his leg disappeared into the wall past his shin, where a faint gray light could be seen in the pitch of the chimney.

  Adrian raised his buttocks higher against the stones behind him and hinged forward, gripping the insides of the opening. He brought his right foot to the wall behind him and pushed, while simultaneously launching himself into the unknown passage.

  He slid through on the broken partition, his entrance heralded by a soft, clinking shush of sound. He put his hands down to lever himself up and pull himself in fully, and sank to his wrists in deep cold. Adrian dragged his knees in and slid to his feet, throwing his arms out for balance when he stepped off the tar-soaked piece of metal-clad wood.

  Small round portals—no bigger than his fists—were set at the top of the low ceiling, letting in the soft, misty light of the sky beyond the castle. He turned in a circle, sliding on the slanting mound beneath his feet. The chamber was as wide, but three times as long, as the one he’d just left.

  And it was filled with gold.

  Chapter 18

  Maisie heard two muffled thumps from somewhere inside the chimney where Adrian had disappeared. Clouds of dust and chunks of soot rained down onto the hearth. She thought he might have given a grunt, and then she heard nothing at all for several moments.

  Prickles erupted over her skin, causing her to shiver, and she pulled the coverlet up over her chest as she sat on her heels at the end of the bed.

  “Adrian?” She thought of how close a space he had disappeared into, and remembered his struggles with being trapped. What if he became wedged inside the stone passage, unable to breathe?

  . . . who trades the death of the Queen . . .

  A cold chill seemed to descend on her, freezing her in place so that she felt she could not have moved had the room been filled with afternhangers. In a flash, her mind imagined his lifeless body, and Maisie could feel the ripping of her heart with each slow thump.

  “Adrian?” This time his name came out as little more than a breathy squeak.

  But then the soot fell in the chimney again, and a tinkling of something else falling, bouncing on the hearth. She heard the scrabbling sound of an object sliding haltingly over stones. Maisie clutched the coverlet to her chest more tightly as she saw one of his boots emerge to crush the dead coals, and then—

  His blackened, bare foot?

  She frowned as he squatted out of the chimney, covered in the darkest filth. His clothes were ruined, his hair and face coated with thick, greasy smears of grime. He clutched against his chest his missing boot, and when she met his eyes, the crinkles at the edges amplified by the layer of soot on his skin, his teeth gleamed in a wide smile.

  “What were you doing?” she demanded, her recent fear dissolving into unreasonable anger. She rose up on her shins as he approached the bed, leaving crisp black prints across her floor.

  He reached her then and grasped her chin and jaw with his crusted hand, holding her face captive while he kissed her mouth. It felt like a necessary thing to life for her then, and perhaps it was for him too. As food to one dying from hunger. Then he pulled away and brought his fingers to splay against her collarbone, pushing her back playfully onto the mattress.

  “What are you about?” She laughed now, leaning on her elbows.

  “I have a gift for you, my queen.” He grinned at her and then, with one swift movement, he seized a fold of the coverlet and whisked it from her body, leaving her nude before him. And then he brought up one knee, then the other, gaining the mattress at her feet.

  “You’ll ruin my bed!” she protested at the black stains he was grinding into the fabric covering, but it was only halfheartedly. He’d called her his queen. “Are you to paint me with soot so that I can be Man’s consort?”

  “Oh, I
’m going to cover your beautiful body,” he promised, as he held his old boot over her, the terrible, bloody stains now covered over and completely hidden by the filth from her chimney. The very idea that they could be erased forever gave her a sudden thrill of excitement.

  And then Adrian turned the boot sole up, pouring a shower of gold onto her stomach.

  Maisie gasped as the cold, tinkling coins slid over her skin and pooled at the seam of her body and the mattress beneath her. She sat up fully as the last coins bounced and rolled, grasping handfuls of them while Adrian threw the boot to the floor.

  “Great gods,” she breathed and then looked up at him, her fingers clutched around the pieces. “Is it . . . ?”

  He nodded and fell to his hands on either side of her legs, crawling up until his face was even with hers. “Silly woman—don’t you know? Dragons are guardians of gold.”

  She let the coins fall from her hand as her arms went around his shoulders, pulling him atop her back onto the mattress with a musical tinkle of the gold all around them.

  Neither Maisie nor Adrian saw Dragon rise from the floor, her long tail swishing soundlessly just above the boards as she lumbered toward the door. They didn’t see the creature dissolve beneath the crack at the bottom, her tail waving as it slid from the room.

  Indeed, no one at all was witness to the sight of Dragon as she made her way slowly through the corridors and stairwells of Wyldonna Castle, working laboriously in her old age to reach a small, secret door too small for an occupant of appreciable height to have noticed before. Dragon made her way across the prickly winter grass, which would soon soften under spring’s gentle winds. The feel of it on her belly was foreign, cold stone having been her cradle for hundreds of long, lonely years.

  And yet the memory of it revived in her enough of an age long ago, when the world was covered in mountains and rivers, of trees that were taller than Wyldonna Castle, cathedral-like spires to the towering peaks from whence she was born. The time when she had claimed a true name and was not referred to by the simple description of her nature. A time when everything was magic, and there was nothing to guard but life itself. Life was the only treasure, love the only wealth. And death was naught but a future thing yet to be realized, many, many years away.

  Dragon clambered over the rocky edge of the cliff, her old claws, stiff from disuse, only slipping twice. She reached the pinnacle of the island, Wyldonna Castle behind her, as the soft gray mist deepened to the color of smoke in a dream, the same color that drifted up from Dragon’s nostrils as she lifted her long muzzle and smelled the sea air.

  She crouched down and her spine arched, her scales trembling as she labored. Minute cracks appeared down the bony protuberances of her shoulders, like a statue that has been struck and is slowly shattering. The accumulated years crumbled and fell away with the quiet sound of pebbles rolling and bouncing down the cliff face, and her wings at last loosened.

  She spread them wide and stretched out her body, raising her face to the sky. She smelled the air again, listened to it. In the wind she heard that, again, the only treasure was life, the only wealth of any value left to guard was love. That once unknowable future that had taken so many lonely seasons to arrive had come for her at last.

  What had her name been? She could not recall. But perhaps the sleeping children she carried in her belly could tell her. Perhaps they would give her a new name, if she was only strong enough to find that safe place to awaken and bear them at last, somewhere in the new land beyond the mist. The magic was fading fast from this place, which had been her home for so very long. Soon it would be gone entirely.

  She opened her jaws, and a long keening roar came from her, a sound of mourning but also of freedom.

  Dragon crouched low once more and then sprang from the rock. Her wings flapped awkwardly for a moment, twisting her body in the air as she dipped, her tail whipping wildly for balance. She lurched and struggled with her wasted muscles, pulling at the wind, seeking the draft, her breath wheezing in her armored chest. Then the translucent skin between the ribs of her wings strained with the fullness of air, and she rose.

  She climbed higher, pulling herself up on the current, rowing at the mist with her now elongated neck, paddling with her claws, running alongside the roiling clouds with the sweet sadness of her mission urging her up, up, up.

  And then Dragon was gone.

  Glayer Felsteppe paced the width of the ship’s deck, pausing at each rail to glance at the Saracen who faced the bow. The dark man was holding a small square card of wood at the end of his outstretched arm, aimed at the nearly invisible horizon. A knotted string emanating from the center of the wooden square was caught between the man’s teeth, and he turned minutely left, right; shifted his arm stiffly up, down.

  It was taking too long. Why was he taking so long? The sky was clear this night, and the Saracen had already made use of a number of strange navigational tools and charts, over and over and over. The cold wind grabbed the hem of his cloak and thrust itself inside, prompting Glayer to snatch the opening more tightly around him with a growl. He began to pace once more.

  At last the Saracen lowered his arm and began wrapping the string in a neat coil around the card.

  “We are here,” he said easily.

  Glayer spun on his heel and strode to stand before him. “Are you certain? You must be certain.”

  “I am certain as anyone could be,” the man said with an air of calm, one that Glayer himself could not claim. “It is difficult to navigate this far north. I am confident this is the approximate location to which you traveled at the year’s end.”

  “Approximate,” Glayer muttered as he turned to squint over the rails of the boat, bow, port, starboard. “I see nothing. Only water. Check your calculations again; if we are too far off course, we might not make shore on the morrow.”

  “I have checked enough,” the man said with bold finality as he finished winding the string and tucked it into a fold of his long robes. Glayer might have been tempted to berate another for speaking to him so boldly, but he knew better than to test the Saracen. “If you do not believe me, you have only to look at your beast.” The man’s eyes flicked to the port rail.

  Glayer’s head turned to follow the man’s gaze and, in truth, the long, sinewy Jagger seemed resigned, defeated, as he leaned his bowed and now bony spine against the railing. His clothing was little more than rags now, his feet bare, his unusually textured black hair matted and clumped around his head. The wide metal collar about the creature-man’s neck—a very useful gift from the Saracen general at Glayer’s side—had dug into his brown flesh when it was first put to use; now it sat on the bony protrusions of the thing’s collarbones.

  It was still a necessity, though. The creature-man was prone to strange fits. Disturbing, demonic displays that caused Glayer nightmares of long fangs and spotted, hairy hide. He’d had several crosses burned into the thing’s flesh to no avail.

  “Jagger!” Glayer demanded. The creature-man’s head turned almost imperceptibly sideways, looking at him with large brown eyes whose deep hue was intensified by the startling brightness of the whites surrounding them. “Is the general correct? Have we arrived?”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” the thing drawled in his strange accent. Glayer thought it similar to the Persians, but not exactly. His English was perfect, but his enunciation was gentle, as if the words became soft and rounded upon being spoken by those full brown lips. “You kept me locked in the ship rather than free me to my people as you promised to do when last I led you to Wyldonna.”

  “Surely you understand that I could not let you go when I had yet to return to collect my funds,” Glayer explained easily. “Of course I will release you to your people—your lover,” he emphasized, “once your friend the queen has delivered to me what she has promised.” He walked across the deck to stand before the man and then crouched down. He spoke quietly, gently. “You want that, don’t you, Jagger? To be returned to your little i
sland of freaks? I’m certain it should be a glorious reunion with your unnatural paramour, even with you as wretched as you’ve become.”

  The man was looking down at his crossed ankles again, but he nodded, and Glayer thought he heard a hitching breath, a choked sob only just held in check.

  “Now, now—don’t start sniveling again. I’m only stating the obvious. If you could see yourself, I’m certain you’d agree.” The creature’s shoulders jerked once and Glayer rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, I’m sure he shall be happy to see you any matter. Perhaps it’s not all so bad. I shan’t tell him that you’ve been . . . unfaithful. I shan’t,” Glayer promised, using his most kindly tone. “Only confirm or deny to me now that we are near to Wyldonna. Once we are landed, I will produce the key that’s right here—” Glayer patted the secret compartment in his leather hauberk, over his heart—“and you shall be free to scamper away to the woodland, as liberated and gay as dearest Pan, taking with you my own heartfelt gratitude. I promise. Now, won’t that be delightful?”

  “You should not have returned to Wyldonna,” Jagger said quietly.

  “What’s that now?” Glayer chuckled. “Nonsense. You’ve obviously not been getting your rest. Now, have we arrived or nay?”

  In the next instant, the creature-man’s head flicked up, but his face could no longer claim the flat, smooth cheekbones and wide proboscis of his usual appearance. Instead, a hairy muzzle shot forward, long fangs bared, and snapped only a whisper from Glayer’s own pointed noise, spittle and wiry whiskers flicking his cheeks.

  Glayer fell back with a shout and then scrambled quickly to his feet, his cloak tangling about his legs and hampering him for precious seconds. He stood panting, staring at the thing that appeared to be only a man once more, although his brown throat bulged and pulsed over and below the metal collar—witness to the wisdom of his incarceration.

  Jagger could not change completely while so restrained.