Dragon's Bait

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Through the quivery slits between her eyelashes, Alys watched Etta gingerly approach. She stopped while still at least six feet away, then put the steaming wooden bowl on the floor and eased it somewhat closer to the bed with her foot, slopping grayish gruel over the edges. Alys grumbled and snorted sleepily and Etta scampered away.

  Eating in front of anyone was too dangerous: She'd have to loosen the bandages and they would easily see that she wasn't nearly so badly hurt as they'd been led to believe. With nothing better to do while she pretended to sleep, Alys actually did fall asleep.

  When she awoke, she was alone. She could hear Gower in his shop next door hammering, a sound she had heard all her life. There was no sign of Etta, but Alys could hear Una talking outside, complaining to someone about the heat this summer. As far back as Alys could remember, Una had always complained; the weather was always too hot for her—or too cold, or too dry, or too windy, or too changeable. Possibly because she was just waking up, a wisp of laughter floated into Alys's memory. She thought of her friend Risa, who had died after stepping on a rusty nail the summer she was eight. Risa had been able to do a wonderful imitation of Una: "It's too ... it's too ... it's too perfect, for my taste," Risa would say, tossing her hair.

  From the direction of the stream where the village women washed their clothes, Alys could very faintly hear singing, a sweet high voice that could only be Aldercy, who—until she'd put aside girlish interests and girlhood friends to get married—had been Alys's friend.

  Without warning, Alys's eyes were suddenly full of tears. Things weren't horrible in Saint Toby's before, she thought. I want to go back, I want to go back. She wiped her nose roughly to bring herself to her senses. Her father was dead; there was no going back. Instead, she got up and fetched the bowl Etta had set out for her. She probably shouldn't have had the strength to do it on her own, but not eating could result in real weakness. She loosened the bandages. Though the meal was cold and congealed into thick lumps, she ate it in quick mouthfuls lest someone enter and find her at it.

  Finished, she tied up the bandages again, lay back down, and hoped that whatever Selendrile was up to, he'd be quick at it.

  Lying on the straw mattress, waiting, she thought about the years during which she had grown up in Saint Toby's, playing with her friends: the hoop games they had made with old wheels, the games of jackstraws, and the straw dolls they used to make. And with that she suddenly knew how to trap Etta. Everybody knew that village girls weren't the only ones to make straw dolls. Witches did, too, except theirs were made in the image of a particular person. Then, when the right spell was spoken, whatever the witch did to the doll would happen to the real person. Alys got up again.

  Working hurriedly, she pulled a handful of straw from the mattress and fashioned a doll, folding the straw in half and tying off the head, then braiding arms and legs. She found a rag, which she wrapped around the figure for clothes, then pulled a tin button off Etta's feast-day dress. For a long moment she held the button, knowing that it was her father's hands which had poured the metal, then shaped it. She was torn between the desire to keep it and the knowledge that putting tin on the doll would make people think it had been imaged after the tinsmith's daughter.

  "I'll make them sorry, Papa," she whispered, though her father had never been the kind of man to seek revenge on anyone.

  Alys fastened the button to the doll, then got a stick from the woodpile by the hearth and fastened the doll to the stick. Hopefully, when the villagers saw this, they would think that Etta had compelled them to condemn her, to leave her tied up on the mountain for the dragon.

  Seeing the completed doll in her own image, Alys felt strangely unsettled. Although she knew she had no witch's power, she whispered out loud—three times, since that was the way with spells—"Not Alys. Not Alys. Not Alys," just to be safe. Then she hid the doll under Etta's mattress and lay down. She'd worry later about how to bring it to everyone's attention.

  Eventually she fell asleep again.

  Eventually she woke up again.

  Slowly the day passed, and when Selendrile finally returned, it was already late evening.

  "Welcome back." Una scrambled up from the table where she and her family were having supper to greet him. She wiped her hands on her apron. "I hope you found everything in order back at your farm." Gower glanced up to scowl at Selendrile; Etta never stopped shoveling food into her mouth, as though afraid somebody'd eat her portion if she let her attention wander.

  Alys groaned and stretched as though Una's greeting had awakened her.

  "Everything's as it should be." Selendrile took Una's hand in his and smiled into her eyes.

  Una blushed and acted surprised, as though she hadn't wiped her hands hoping for just this.

  "And how's my little brother?" Selendrile knelt beside Alys's bed.

  "I hate you," she murmured into his ear. "Without you, the plan's going all wrong."

  "What?" Una asked.

  "He said better, thank you, but he feels weak from lying down for so long." Selendrile grabbed her by her unbandaged arm and pulled her to her feet. "There," he said chipperly, "how's that?"

  She glared at him. "Now I'm supposed to be able to walk?" she asked.

  "You want to go for a walk?" Selendrile said. "I'm not sure that's for the best."

  She started to sit back down, but he held her where she was.

  "Well, if you insist. But slowly." He smiled and nodded to the others and led her toward the door.

  "What are you doing?" she demanded.

  "You're doing fine," he assured her.

  She sighed and didn't try to get any more out of him until they were outside. They walked very slowly, with her leaning heavily on his shoulder because many of the villagers were out, pointing at her and saying, "There's the poor boy hurt when Gower's wheel failed."

  Alys loosened the bandage slightly. "We're going too far," she warned. "If we talk quietly, nobody'll hear us. If I'm supposed to be half dying, I shouldn't be able to walk this far."

  Smiling and nodding at someone across the way, Selendrile said, "We can always say you overextended yourself. I'll carry you back."

  "You will not," Alys told him.

  He smiled but didn't answer till they were beyond the last cottage. "So," he said, "what have you done all day?"

  "What have I done?" Alys pulled away from his encircling arm and sat on a log by the side of the road. "What have you done?"

  Selendrile shrugged. "Nothing. I've just been waiting for evening."

  "What?"

  "Nothing. I've just been w—"

  "Why?"

  He paused to look at her before answering. "Evenings are more romantic."

  "What?"

  He sighed, sounding annoyed, either at her limited range of questions or at her tone. "Humans find moonlight romantic, right? You want me to flirt with Una, right? Why are you getting all upset when I'm doing exactly what you told me to do?"

  "I never told you..." Alys rested her head in her hand, exasperated at the loss of a whole day.

  "Besides," he added, "we don't want to arouse suspicion by working too fast."

  "All right," she said.

  "Besides—"

  "All right." She pulled the bandage entirely away from her face so she could speak properly. "I've been thinking more about the plan. We want everyone to believe Gower is making bad wheels, so we started with the wheel he made for us. Can you damage some of the ones he's made for other people?"

  "Me?" Selendrile asked.

  "Maybe by turning into a mouse and gnawing at a spoke here and there? Just a little bit, as though Gower gouged the wood while working it and didn't bother starting over?"

  Slowly he nodded.

  "As for Una ... Eventually what we want is for her to leave Gower for you." Selendrile didn't react. "Slowly, over the next two or three days, we want her to fall in love with you, make a fool of herself in front of the other villagers."

  His voice giving aw
ay nothing of what he thought, he asked, "Somebody falling in love with me would look foolish to the villagers?"

  "No." Even in the moonlight she found herself distracted by the purple of his eyes. She looked away, suddenly confused. "No. I just mean ... a married woman, with a daughter your age..." He arched his eyebrows. "...the age you seem..." She forced herself to meet his eyes again. "It'll look foolish for Una."

  "Ah," he said.

  "So that when you ask her to run away with you, to meet you in Griswold, and then you never show up there, she'll be too ashamed to come back to Saint Toby's because everyone will know where she went and why."

  Once more Selendrile nodded.

  "As for Etta, I made a straw image of myself and hid it in her things. Now all we have to do is get people to look—just like we did with Atherton. I thought maybe you can turn yourself into a crow and follow her around—witches always have crows."

  Selendrile didn't look convinced about that one.

  "And every time she has an argument with one of her friends—she's always having arguments—we can do something to the friend."

  "Something like what?"

  "I don't know. It didn't take much for them to believe / was a witch."

  "Cause them to fall down stairs?" Selendrile suggested. He looked interested again. Maybe too interested. "Have their geese or chickens disappear? Perhaps burn down a few houses? Something like that?"

  Alys squirmed. "Something like that."

  "I see."

  "We'll discuss it beforehand, for each person."

  "Certainly," he said with a smoothness she didn't like at all.

  "Maybe," Alys started, "you—"

  Selendrile lunged at her.

  Alys didn't have time to gasp before he had one hand on her shoulder and the other ... Suddenly she realized what he was doing: shoving the bloodied bandage up by her jaw. In another moment, even as she scrambled to tighten the cloth back around her head, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps and the jangle of metal.

  The bandage wasn't as secure as it should have been when a man came around the corner from the direction of Saint Toby's. Alys tried to disguise her sigh of relief. The man was a stranger—obviously a wandering peddler: He had pots and crocks and assorted other merchandise lashed to his back and chest and belt.

  "Hello, my friends, hello," he said in a loud, squeaky voice that hurt Alys's ears. He flashed a smile that showed good strong teeth despite the shabbiness of his clothes and the fact that he was dirty and had a patch over his right eye. He pointed at Alys. "You must be that young lad I heard tell about what got hurt in that farm-cart accident."

  Alys nodded, holding the bandage with her hand, unsure whether it might come loose.

  "I just been in town a few hours, but already I heard all about it from everybody. Every body's talking. Terrible thing, terrible thing. I told that woman, the wheelwright's wife, I got just the thing for you, but she wouldn't let me in the house, more's the shame, but now, just as I'm leaving, here you are."

  Here I am, Alys thought. Trust it to her luck that the man wasn't going to spend the night at Saint Toby's like any normal peddler but would set out again this late.

  The man was disentangling himself from the various bags and harness that held his wares. "I have," he repeated, "just the thing."

  "That's very kind of you," Alys mumbled into the bandage, "but really we don't have any money anyway—"

  "No, no, I'll have it in a moment." With his one pale brown eye, he looked up from pawing through the contents of his bags. "Silver it is," he said. "Where am I going to sell silver in villages like this? But it has healing properties. That'll make it worth more, you say?" He waggled a dirty finger at her. "But it's not for sale. It's for giving. An old woman without enough money to put beans in her soup gave it to me when I caught the flux last winter. She said, 'I'll give you this-here bracelet, like someone gave it to me, and someone before that gave it to her, and when you're through with it you must give it away, too.'" He went back to looking through his bag. "That's where the magic is, don't you know, in the giving it away."

  Alys glanced at Selendrile, who shrugged.

  "Here it is." The peddler pulled something out of his bag with a flourish, but Alys couldn't get a good look at it. "Hmmm," he said, "it should probably go on your injured arm. You"—he indicated Selendrile—"hold the lad's arm out straight, and I'll put it on."

  It seemed the fastest way to get rid of him. Alys gave a nod to Selendrile, who helped support her arm as though it were sore.

  After seeing all the real silver that she had in the past couple of days, Alys caught one glimpse of the peddler's so-called silver bracelet and knew it was too dull, too heavy to be real. If he thought he was going to talk her into—

  But before Alys could finish the thought, the peddler shoved her so that she fell off the log, causing the bandage to drop away from her face entirely.

  She didn't have time to worry about that, for in the same instant he snapped the bracelet around Selendrile's arm and Selendrile cried out as though the metal burned. But before he could seize the bracelet off, the peddler swung one of his huge pots and cracked Selendrile across the side of the head with it.

  Selendrile collapsed to the ground just as Alys sprang to her feet and leaped at the man. He hit her in the stomach with his elbow; then, when she doubled over, he ran into her so that they fell to the ground, him on top of her.

  She tried to rake her fingers across his face, but he turned so that she only ripped off the eye patch before he had both her hands pinned to the ground on either side of her head. Two perfectly whole and healthy pale brown eyes looked down at her, and then the peddler smiled.

  "Atherton!" she gasped.

  Chapter 13

  ATHERTON FLIPPED her facedown into the dirt and dragged her hands behind her back.

  "Selendrile!" she cried as the Inquisitor twisted rope around her wrists. "Selendrile!"

  But when Atherton finally got up, removing his knee from the small of her back, she was able to see the dragon-youth still sprawled motionless on the ground.

  Backing away from her, his eyes shifting warily from her to Selendrile, Atherton approached his dropped peddler's pack. Be pretending, she thought at Selendrile as Atherton fished out another metal band, this one attached to a short length of chain. Grab him as soon as he comes near.

  But Selendrile made no move as Atherton used the bands and chain to shackle his arms behind his back. Only when the dragon-youth was safely bound did Atherton nudge him onto his side. "Get up," he commanded. When a rough shake got no reaction, he slapped him hard enough that Alys winced.

  Selendrile groaned and stirred, and Atherton sidled away from him.

  "Coward," Alys jeered.

  Atherton jerked her to her feet and shoved her at Selendrile. "Get him up and get him to cooperate, or I'll kill him here and now." Atherton pulled a short, broad dagger from his belt. He held it under her chin so that the point pressed against her skin just short of cutting. "Don't assume that as a man of the Church I'll stay my hand from doing it. I know what that creature is—spawn of Satan, evil incarnate. And your association with ...it... proves that you are the same."

  Alys didn't pause to try to reason out how Atherton could know that Selendrile wasn't what he appeared. "You're more evil—"

  He slapped her, hard. All her fifteen years, no one had ever hit her before. Even during the trial, even with all the roughness edged with the threat of death, no one had struck her.

  Be careful, she warned herself. Atherton seemed dangerously close to mindless violence. At least for the moment he apparendy wanted them alive, and she had to take care not to change that.

  With a deep breath she knelt beside Selendrile. What was she supposed to do, with her hands tied behind her back? She nudged him with her knee. "Selendrile. We're in trouble. Get up."

  Again he groaned, then he caught his breath as though in pain. Still, she couldn't see any blood where Atherton had
hit him. Maybe he wasn't too badly hurt after all.

  "Selendrile," she repeated.

  He opened his eyes slowly, gingerly.

  "It's Atherton," she told him. "Atherton's here."

  Selendrile winced, then kept his eyes closed.

  Alys heard Atherton take a step closer. "Selendrile, get up," she begged, knowing that Atherton would consider driving the dagger into his heart as an act of faith in God. "I can't help you. He's tied my hands, too."

  Selendrile forced himself to sit up, though he swayed dizzily.

  Alys followed his gaze and saw Atherton pouring liquid from a vial into his hand. Now what? She jerked as he spattered it onto their upturned faces, but it didn't hurt. Water, she realized; and, a moment later, Holy water. If he was expecting that they would go up in flames or that their skin would peel off, he must have been disappointed. But no, he seemed satisfied that they'd both flinched, as though this proved more than that they'd been startled.

  Do something, she mentally urged Selendrile, wondering why he was so sluggish, why he didn't transform into something big and powerful and fierce.

  Atherton put the vial back into his pack and once again waved the dagger. "Up, both of you."

  "Can't you see he's hurt?" Alys said. "With that blow to his head, he won't be able to make it back to Saint Toby's without help."

  Atherton snorted. "Blow to his head," he sneered. "It's the iron shackles. Iron to bind the fey. He won't be able to take on other shapes until I remove the iron."

  Alys looked to Selendrile to see if this was true. His teeth were clenched with what might have been pain or loathing or both, and his breathing was still ragged. She saw that his face was pale and damp with sweat. The last of her hope seeped out of her. "You should have told me," she said softly.

  He looked at her but said nothing.

  Atherton said, "Now get up."

  Alys scrambled to her feet. Selendrile followed more slowly, still looking unsteady.

  "And as for Saint Toby's," Atherton said, "I don't care one whit about that foul little place or anybody in it. We're going back to Griswold, where you'll publicly admit what you did and why. You'll bare your black little soul for everyone, and then they'll know how they wronged me. Then they'll see what you are. Then you'll know what it's like..." He'd grabbed the collar of her shirt and raised his hand, the one with the knife in it.