by Jenni Ward
Softly Quinn whispered to her, “Mary. Sorcerers aren’t all bad, just like not all dragons are good. Dragon magic...”
“So why is it I am unable to read? That’s not a dragon’s fault –it’s all a sorcerer’s fault.” Mary pushed his hand away, determined to keep her anger going. “And I got two-for-one today!”
“Mary, keep your voice down, someone may hear you.” Quinn paused and looked around before adding, “Prater may hear you.”
“Get out. You don’t need me to help you, you can help yourself. You could have left at any time. You made a fool out of me!” She whipped around to face Quinn. Her anger bubbled over, expressing her frustration at losing her gift of reading and feeling betrayed by Quinn. While she didn’t want to admit it aloud, a small part of her acknowledged the hurt Prater must have felt about her hiding the truth and the subsequent feeling of being a fool.
“Mary...”
“Just get out!”
“Mary, let me explain...”
“Get out!”
“Mary, I couldn’t have just...”
“Leave me be.”
“But Mary, let me explain first, please...”
Her head shook in response and he held his head in his hands for a moment.
Mary cast her gaze down at the book on the floor. It stared up at her, mocking her, like two girls whispering a secret that you would never hear yourself.
Picking up one book at a time, she placed them randomly back on the shelves–just to make the room look tidier. With certain books Mary felt frustrated as she recognised them; she looked at them once, twice, multiple times. All the books she wanted to read, she now couldn’t. All the knowledge they contained lost as they would now sit idle on the shelves. Yansa had once told her to read all the books; now though, Mary knew that she wouldn’t.
Chapter 11
Night had fallen and Mary sat in the middle of the room; it didn’t really matter to her that the fire didn’t burn to keep her warm. She had gotten used to the cold as she’d sat there with her thoughts. Tending to the books had made her feel as if she had a role to play in the village, which in turn made her feel part of it. She’d also realised that because she’d rescued a sorcerer there would be no good luck from the dragons...but the possibility of the opposite remained.
Mary heard feet crunching the glass on the stone floor and looked up in time to see Prater stop suddenly in the doorway; water dripped from his clothing and began to form small puddles on the floor. While his men continued towards the stairs, his head moved around the room – Mary had spent most of the night replacing the books to their rightful homes.
“It’s freezing in here,” Prater’s voice echoed in the room.
Mary’s eyes trailed away from Prater and back to her feet that rested against the floor. She reached up and tugged on the light brown shawl that loosely wrapped over her shoulders so that she could feel it against her dress.
“Shouldn’t you be with your dragon? You are bound after all, aren’t you?”
Mary pulled the sleeve of her dress down to cover her binding mark. “I was not bound to him.”
“Not bound to the dragon, okay, let’s say for the sake of argument I believe you.” Prater paused and continued to look in Mary’s direction as she stood up. “Maybe then the second one, if Cecilia is a sorceress but then why would she be angry with you; so maybe you’re bound to a sorcerer then?”
“No.” Mary turned and walked to another desk; once seated, she trailed her fingers over the swirls and lines of the grain.
Prater faltered in his expression as a few of his men headed upstairs to search Mary’s bedchamber. She watched the corridor until it had emptied, and then she turned her attention back to the patterns in the wood on the desktop.
“Neither?”
Mary heard Prater’s hard-soled shoes echo across the stone bricks as he approached her. He crouched down beside the desk and moved Mary’s hair away from her face.
“Then who are you bound to?” His face moved closer to hers.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mary whispered. Her eyes twitched every time she heard a noise above; as she listened, something hit the floor with a thud, followed by a crunching sound – the reflection board.
“It does matter, Mary,” Prater paused and reached his right hand out to lift Mary’s chin so he could look in her eyes. “It matters, Mary, because I need to know if someone is going to come looking for you.”
The words sent a shiver down Mary’s spine, similar to the type of feeling she got when she walked past the burial yard outside of town. People went there to remember, to grieve, but for Mary it had always been a place for dead things, evil things. Prater held Mary’s face, his fingers positioned in the same position that Quinn had held her but it didn’t elicit the same feelings inside her.
“No one will come looking for me, Master Prater.” She continued to avoid eye contact with him as she dealt with feelings of sadness and defeat. Without her gift of reading she felt lost and without purpose.
“Tell me who he is, Mary...and I’ll leave this building as it is now.”
“Who?”
“Who you are bound to, Mary?” Prater asked. “It was one of the men you rescued; I don’t believe your story about a book-keeper.”
Raising her head, Mary said, “He is not a book-keeper, not a dragon, and not a sorcerer. I make mistakes in the same way that you do and have in the past.”
“Tell me his name...tell me his name or I will destroy all this.”
“Even you wouldn’t be so foolish as to try and destroy the books again,” Mary replied with a smile; she spoke the words with confidence knowing that the threat couldn’t be fulfilled.
Prater sneered. He removed his hand from Mary’s face and leaned back on his heels to consider his next question.
“Life could have been so different without dragons and sorcerers. Look at how the magic guides even what we humans do. I mean, you don’t welcome any strangers to our village. Trade only occurs if you or one of your men has vetted the poor person, probably to the point of distraction. We live in fear of the other two kingdoms because of the past, because of that magic both the other sides possess.” Mary paused watching Prater for a moment. “Do you really believe that all those men you hung were dragons?”
“It is possible.”
“Okay, let’s say that they were all dragon, huh? What exactly do you think those dragons might have done? You threaten the books but it’s not like the night when you were determined to destroy them. Why should you feel the need to kill them if we are abiding by the rules?”
“You know nothing about why I need to protect this village from them! This isn’t just about the books Mary, there is so much more to this!” Prater replied clenching his fist. “We all have lost in this village. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that night and what happened to my own father. You’ve spent ten years in this building with all these books but how much do you really know about people and life, Mary?”
“About the same as you I would think, though perhaps we see things differently. Dragons are not the enemy.” Mary paused as she heard footsteps on the stairs.
“We’ve gone through every room except this one, Master,” Delwyn said as he entered the main room.
“No need to search in here, the door is elsewhere – you must have missed something. It will be something small, insignificant, hiding the way. It will be somewhere on this floor...” Prater’s head slowly titled to one side as he watched her. “On second thought, tell the men they can leave – you as well, Delwyn – Mary is going to show me where the door is.”
“As you order, Master,” Delwyn replied and walked back to the passage room. “Men, we’re done here for the moment; return to your daily life.”
As the men filtered out of the building, Prater stepped forward and watched them leave. He closed the large doors to the room they were in and turned back to Mary.
“Now, where were we? That’s right; you were trying t
o tell me that dragons are not the enemy? Let me tell you about dragons. I was fifteen when I went into the Great Forest with my father to hunt. We came across this man there – a stranger; he told us to be careful to not go deeper into the forest that day. He seemed half-mad, a dishevelled old man with torn clothing and one eye missing – he just had this nasty scar cutting across where it should have been. Father and I kept on hunting. I’d grown up hunting in that forest; we’d never seen anything to fear in there except for our own imaginations. We were following a deer and saw it enter a clearing — a clear shot. Father had his arrow ready to fly when this bloody dragon swooped down. It grabbed that deer in its claws and then looked at us. The sound, Mary, I’d never heard anything like it, louder than a bear and fierce. When I looked to Father, he’d fallen to the ground, his hand over his chest. When I turned back the dragon was gone and I ran blindly back to the village for help.”
“Dragons can’t kill with sound...”
“No, but people can die of fright! The dragon killed my father. My father and I were close, and the dragon took him away.” Prater paced back and forth, his hands calming for a moment before he looked back over at Mary. “As I ran for the village, I came across that man. You know what he did? He smiled at me and nodded, then said: ‘They’re coming for all humans, boy, and no sorcerer will save you, best remember that.’ I never saw him again, but I’ve ensured that I’ve protected this village ever since.”
“Protected? Is that what you call it? It was your fault we lost over half the village on the night of the burning; your fault – nobody else’s.”
“I didn’t know that would happen. I just wanted to make the dragons feel the same pain I was in.” Prater paused and pushed the loose hair away from Mary’s face. “If my twin hadn’t died after birth then he would have perished too. I don’t know, maybe then it would never have happened because he would have been the leader and not me. After that though, I made sure strangers stayed away. You’ll never understand it Mary, the dragons in your mind are nothing more than images you’ve created based on books written by dragons. It’s not like they’re going to write a book that says ‘Hey, dragons are people-killing monsters.’”
“You blame the dragons for taking your father away, yet you’ve taken away more from others. What if all those men, fourteen you’ve hung, were just human? Huh? Tell me Prater, who is the real monster then?”
Shaking his head, Prater exhaled. “And what if every single one was really a dragon? Or maybe a sorcerer? One of them was a dragon...that much I am sure of...one of the last two I think...which one was it, Mary?” Prater leaned forward and shook Mary by her shoulders. “Or maybe it was this other mystery man?”
Mary shook her head and moved her eyes to stare past him. She feared he had begun to piece together a theory and subsequent questions that would require answers. Prater sneered and removed his hands. He wandered over to one of the shelves and picked a random book. He returned to Mary with it in his hand. “Maybe the answer to my question is in this book?”
“Maybe it is.”
“What’s it about?” Prater threw the book so that it landed right in front of Mary with a resounding thud.
That’s a good question, Mary thought. She looked at the cover of the book. Lines, curves – she knew they were letters, but which ones she had no idea; frustrated, her eyebrows drew nearer to each other. Why couldn’t the book he chose have had a picture on the cover?
“Well, Mary, what is this book about?”
Mary looked at it and decided that since he couldn’t read either, it wouldn’t matter what she said, “It’s about crops, how to look after them and everything.”
Prater walked back over to her and crouched down. Picking up the book, Prater turned it over in his hand so that the front cover faced upwards. “If it’s about crops then why is the title ‘A History of Village Buildings’?”
“It’s not.”
“It is. You see, I know how to read, just like you. Call it my little secret...our little secret now.”
Mary glanced up to study Prater’s expression, expecting to see something, maybe playfulness or a joke, but his face spoke only of seriousness. Her eyes widened in shock.
“Read, but...”
“No questions on that matter at the moment. What I don’t understand is that since you know how to read, why lie about what this book is about?”
Shrugging her shoulders, Mary replied, “Didn’t think it mattered.”
“Well, Mary, it does matter. Now that you know my secret, I want to know yours.”
Mary turned her face further away from Prater’s even though she knew it would accomplish nothing. “It’s not just my secret, so I can’t tell it.”
“Then tell me where the tunnel is.” He leaned close with an insincere smile plastered on his face.
Mary wondered how he could know about the tunnel; her fingers gripped the fabric of her skirt. “What tunnel, Master?”
“The one that leads from the book building to the cell.” Mary gulped and bit her lip. She tapped her foot against the floor, grateful it made no noise.
“There’s a tunnel?” Mary knew the awkward change in pitch gave her away. Prater reached out, touched Mary’s shoulder and leant back on his heels, just slightly.
“You know there’s tunnel, Mary. Delwyn and I just spent the better part of a few hours going over every inch of that cell. We found it, the deeper indentation around a set of bricks. I couldn’t get the door to open though so I suspect that it can only be done from one side – the other side, where the tunnel is.”
“That’s an interesting story.”
“Mary, here’s what I think. The last two men vanished from that cell, and I believe it was you who let them free.” Mary cast her eyes down since Prater’s touch prevented her from turning her body further away. “You thought them to be special, didn’t you, Mary? Perhaps it was something you read?”
“I have read a lot of things in a lot of books, Master.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Mary.”
“I don’t know about a tunnel or how those men vanished from the cell.”
“But you told me that the first of the two was special Mary, you said you had read something, and we should treat him right.”
“I did read something, but it did not say that he would vanish from the cell...”
“You mean be assisted in an escape...”
“I don’t...”
“I know, Mary, you don’t know anything about it, right?” Prater pursed his lips.
Mary tried to continue focusing away from him but when Prater shifted his head to the side her gaze returned to his face. She felt his hand as it moved from her cheek and down to her chin, raising Mary’s face up he forced her to look into his eyes.
“I can smash that stone door in that is in the cell and follow it Mary, make no mistake that I will do that if necessary.”
She didn’t want that. Yansa had entrusted the knowledge of the tunnels to her. Her heart fell knowing she had likely failed in keeping that a secret already. Thoughts raced through her mind and the sorceress’ face flashed in her mind. “Perhaps it was that woman who freed the men...”
“Do you think me simple, Mary? Do you think that I can be so easily fooled?” Prater smiled at his own statement. “You’re not good at lying, Mary – just tell me the truth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Prater nodded. “Guess you’ll just have to spend some time in the cell, after all. I doubt anyone will come to rescue you – and if they do, I’ll be waiting.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re saying you’re going to lock me up until you get your dragon?” Mary finally turned to look Prater directly in the eyes, resolute to know what her future had in store.
The bad luck has started, Mary thought, she blamed herself for binding to a mere mortal and then stupidly rescuing a sorcerer. The dragons are not happy with what I did.
“We’re going to find
the way into the cell from here. I doubt that you can get out of the cell from inside it – no, you would need someone to open it. I will allow the men time to rest and go about their daily business, but make no mistake, Mary – we will find that tunnel. Until you give up the tunnel, or your dragon, you can consider the cell your new home. All you have to do is give him up, a name, place...or better yet you could just call him to you. I’ve read they come when called...especially since you’re bound.”
“I am not bound to a dragon so no one would come if I called. I’ve told you already that I’m bound to a mere mortal. There is nothing else that you need to know about that!” Mary spat back, as angry with herself as Prater.
“I could have made you happy, Mary, but I guess we’re never going to know.” He stood up and then grabbed Mary’s arm, pulling her to her feet. “I’m sure you’ll find the cell comfortable. I will keep tearing apart this building until not one book is left on any of the shelves.”
Mary tried to push him away, to free herself from his grip. As she pushed against him, she looked up to see Delwyn standing in the doorway.
“Master, do you think that’s necessary?”
Prater’s head whipped around and glowered at Delwyn, “Who is the leader of this village?”
For a moment Mary wondered if Delwyn might help but then saw him look away. The other men could be heard descending the stairs and Prater nodded towards the narrow book room. With a nod of his head Mary watched as Delwyn avoided looking at her and directed the men away from them.
Tightening his grip, Prater dragged Mary out through the opening of the book building and across the dark muddy way to the cell. Prater closed the gold door on Mary, leaving her in total darkness.
In her solitude, Mary curled her knees up to meet her chin. Burying her face between them, she allowed, at last, all the tears to fall freely from her eyes.
