The Dragonlord's Call Short Story Collection

by K. S. Villoso

  It is the kind of thing his father might have told him. That hurts him more than the hidden rebuke. He drops his head. “I didn’t even have time,” he replies. “They see me and they see someone who is not like them. Less a man.”

  “You are a boy.”

  “More an animal in their eyes. I cannot even buy food without getting gawked at.”

  “So deal with it. You cannot hope to achieve great things if you cannot even mingle with others.”

  “I cannot mingle because I do not belong here. I stand out too much.” Only that solid patience honed by his own father over the years stops him from exploding. He curls his hands into fists and feels the nails dig into his skin.

  The tall, pale man looks down at him and shakes his head. “That will never happen if you stand there and complain. Yes, they will look at you and they will see someone different, someone they will ridicule or find fascinating. The secret lies in leaving a different impression as soon as you walk away from them. Change everything they assumed and make them feel like fools. Have them look at you a second time with respect, or awe, or fear.” Yn Garr places his hand on Enosh’s shoulder and smiles, but it is not a kind smile. It is a smile tinged with layers of expectation and it cuts him to the core.

  He tells Jarche as much later. “He wants too much from me,” he says. “I cannot live like this. This is not even my life to begin with.”

  Jarche snorts at him. “And where will you go?” she asks, as she has asked him a hundred times before. “How will you pick up that life you began with?”

  “It isn’t even that,” he murmurs. “He’s trying to stick a twig in loose sand.”

  “A square peg in a round hole.”

  “You Kags!” he roars, running off to bed without supper, his head full of words he cannot understand.

  Yn Garr was once a heavy man. You can tell it from his frame and the twist of the lean muscle around his shoulders. And he is old; not so old that you know he is bound to die soon, but no longer young. Ageless, some might call him. The skin on his face is like tough leather and you are not sure about the colour of his eyes because you cannot stare into them for very long.

  He is very hard to hate.

  Enosh finds him in the study some evenings, poring over books with a goblet of wine in his hand and a plate of thinly-sliced ham by his elbow. He does not think he has ever really seen him eat. Yn Garr is always engrossed with his reading. There are thousands of books in his study and he is always bringing more home.

  “Sit,” he tells Enosh, gesturing. Enosh sits, awkwardly.

  Yn Garr is silent for a while as he thumbs through his book. There are liver spots under his jaw, spots that belong to an older man. Enosh wonders why he has never noticed before.

  “Jarche tells me you have been asking about Kag lore,” he says at last.

  “It occupies my time, sir,” he admits.

  “You are bored.”

  Enosh hesitates for a moment. “I…I would like to learn more about it, if it pleases you. I know we have been studying more important things before, but…”

  Yn Garr glances up. A slight movement tugs at the corner of his lips. Knowing Yn Garr, it is neither a smile nor a frown. But he says, “There are worse things you can do with your time.” He taps his fingers across his desk thoughtfully. “Maybe a collection of stories. Cavalli is not the worst storyteller out there. My scribe can arrange…”

  “Nothing extravagant, sir. I’d maybe like a book on the story of Agartes’ life,” Enosh says, thinking of the girl. “He seems very important to the Kags.”

  Yn Garr gets up. The movement is sudden and it startles Enosh. For a moment, he is wracked with the idea that he must have crossed the line. Jarche has told him more times than he can count how he is not a guest to make demands nor a little lordling to be pampered. He is not exactly sure what he is sometimes, except that he owes Yn Garr his life and if the man wants to make some sort of apprentice out of him then he is entitled to it.

  “Look at this, Ylir,” Yn Garr says, pulling a book from the shelf. He flips to the last page. “This is an account of someone who witnessed several murders up until the killer is captured and tried. Do you think his tale ends there?”

  “I do not understand, sir.”

  “You don’t. Of course you don’t.” The man runs a hand through his snow-white hair. “Stories assume that there is a beginning and an end. But that is not how it goes. A man’s life is written before he is born and it often continues to write itself long after he is dead. I would rather not fill your head with nonsense.”

  “Sir?”

  “You must not think of life as a story. Else I risk you standing there wondering if yours ended at the sea.” He places his hand on Enosh’s head. “I will give you other stories. The founding of Cael and Kiel will contain anecdotes on Agartes, if not focused solely on his life. Knowledge of this will be useful to you as we proceed with your education.”

  “I only wanted to learn about Agartes,” he mumbles as Yn Garr leads him to the door. “About what happened to him.”

  “The stories say he disappeared,” Yn Garr tells him. A mournful look comes over his face. “I hope I’ve made my point.” And then he turns around and shuts the door without touching it.

  It gets harder to paint the details as the weeks go by.

  The memories remain. So as he wakes and breathes the memories remain. But he finds certain threads evading his mind, the images of so many things becoming duller whenever he tries to reach for them. He panics one night when he realizes he does not remember what his brother looks like. He knows the outline of his face and knows he can tell him in an instant from a crowd, but he cannot see it.

  He tries again the very next morning when they break their fast over oatmeal and salt fish. “Can we get a puppy?” he asks her.

  She nearly drops a spoon in surprise. “Whatever for?” she replies suspiciously, and he knows, he just knows she is thinking he wants it for eating.

  “My brother loved dogs,” he tells her. She relaxes, and he laughs. “He did. He was crazy about them. He’d nap under the hut with them, all five or six of them trying to fit into his lap at once. They would say his dogs won’t hunt because they’d rather get loved by him than track prey, but that was far from the truth. They ran for him and he would bring home deer or boar all by himself. That was unheard of for someone so young.”

  “Mmm,” she says.

  He takes it as a sign to continue, although he is aware she’d often rather he didn’t. “He’s younger than me, but he’s faster and he can throw a spear better, so our father always said. Stronger, too, although I never dared admit that to his face. The elders called him wild. He was always running off whenever the mood strikes him, sleeping in a little cave by the sea with his dogs and swearing he has no need of us. He always came back, though. No matter how bad he claims he hates us he always came back.”

  “Mmm,” Jarche repeats, disinterested.

  “He’s somewhat taller than me—not by much. Hair fairer than mine, but not by much either. Oh, and he’s got blue eyes,” and that catches her attention although she pretends it doesn’t. He grins. “He’s part-Baidh,” he explains.

  “And pray, tell, how that is possible,” she says dryly, pretending not to look at him and wonder how he could be part-Baidhan. He relishes her confusion, pushing his elbows away from the table, and grins.

  “It’s not that blue,” he says. “Not like yours. Not sky-blue. They’re sea-blue. Dark, almost grey, except at certain lights.”

  Their conversation is broken by a farmer’s boy coming in with a pail of eggs Jarche ordered a week ago, and while she is paying him he takes the time to run out of the back door and laugh at the idea that he has gotten her. Either she will drown with curiosity or she will come up to him and ask him and he thinks—he is pretty sure—that he is going to make her beg. The very thought entertains him.

  But the whole charade does not make him remember his brother’s face.

>   It is not that he was lying. He doesn’t lie, not about these things. He thinks it is a high shame to embellish on details in order to mesmerize someone. His brother was blue-eyed. His blood was part-Baidh. But those words, especially spoken as Kag words, meant nothing in the end. They were insubstantial. They did not fill the blank spaces in his head.

  And they are very big blank spaces. He does not even try to measure how big. The thought is almost too much to bear.

  He meets up with the girl again and she takes him for a walk in the fields outside town. They are very beautiful fields—lush and green (the Mother’s colour), with low fences that stretch as far as the eye can see. The air is clean and smells cool and sweet and surprisingly not-tinged with sheep manure.

  “Roving wind, falling leaf,

  Take me home, far from grief.”

  He is not even aware he has spoken until she looks at him curiously and asks, “That is an old verse. You know the words perfectly. Who taught you, your benefactor?”

  “Not he,” he answers. “My mother.”

  “Oh?” And now she is curious and unlike Jarche he feels bad about this because he has just claimed something that is not his, because he is unsure if he is ashamed about that or if he is merely ashamed for not having anything of his own to prove people wrong with. He clears his throat, to give himself time to think.

  “My brother’s mother,” he finally corrects himself. “She was from Baidh. My own mother died giving birth to me—she was of Gorent, as my father, as I am.”

  “Oh,” she says, in a tone he pretends he did not hear. “That’s why she knows.” She tugs at his arm, her breath tickling the crook of his shoulder. “Do go on.”

  “Well, what’s there to go on about? She spoke to us in our tongue, which she learned from my father, but that was one of the few things she often repeated in Kag.” He takes a deep breath. The irritation passes. Suddenly he is no longer struggling with wanting to show off or hating himself for using Kag things to show off with. Suddenly he just feels sad, and lonely, and so very homesick.

  “I remember she would tell us about Baidh, the things her own mother would cook or how her father would play the piano and she would sit on his lap and listen. She was my mother, because I never knew mine. She loved me like her own.”

  “Does she look like me?” the girl asks. “I mean—a Baidhan.”

  “The hair, yes. Grey eyes. My father met her when he was studying in Baidh, I was told. They fell in love. Later, my mother followed him while pregnant with me and it was said that the pain of my father’s betrayal was so great that she died giving birth. My father took Soshain and me home and the elders were very angry but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.”

  He wonders, then, what she must think of these barbaric Gorent men who forget their wives back home and let other women raise their sons. She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say anything. They stop to eat at the edge of a wood overlooking a quiet little trail. He goes off to make water and when he returns she is wringing her hands and wiping what looks like to be a tear from the corner of her eye.

  “That is just sad,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “This woman your father took home. You didn’t hate her.”

  He takes the piece of bread she is holding out for him and rubs it between his fingers. Crumbs gather under his nails. “I could never have hated her. She was kind to me even when she had no reason to be. I never knew my mother, but Soshain loved my father, and he loved her in return.”

  “That is enough,” she agrees. “But…loved? You talk of the past.”

  “It is the past.”

  “I know your father died, but what of her?”

  He sits on the grass beside her. “She died giving birth to my brother’s sister, who also died.” His eyesight blurs as he speaks. Stubbornly, he turns away and runs his fingers over his brow.

  But her fingers around his neck, suddenly around his neck, are soft and cool and he does not turn away too much. “Oh Enosh,” she whispers against his ear. She smells like cut grass and summer rain. He wraps her hand around his and thinks her sorrow is genuine.

  Sometime in the night he wakes up with the memory of that day he called his brother bastard.

  The image of his face is now blindingly clear and sharp, so sharp it feels like a blade. It forces Enosh up and out of bed, panting, and the flickering lantern-light does nothing to wipe his mind clean. He sees the pain and the betrayal reflecting off eyes that had never looked at him with anything but trust and adoration and it is like he is right there in front of him again. Enosh tries to remember if he ever said anything to blunt his words, if he tried to make his brother understand instead of hear, but he knows thinking such thoughts makes him nothing but a hypocrite. Words meant to scar cannot be softened. If his brother is alive perhaps…

  He wipes sweat (he insists it is sweat) off his face and makes his way to the kitchen for a drink. He fumbles in the dark for a glass, finds one, scoops water out of the big potted jar. He swallows without tasting. Jarche warned him, after all. He sees his scars without looking—the deep gouges across his back, the puckered slash under his hip, the break in his skull, and he thinks they are not enough, that he deserved more.

  “You saw the girl again,” Yn Garr says from the doorway. “I told you not to.”

  He does not have the desire to argue. He nods. Yn Garr crosses the room in two strides and hits him. He doesn’t even feel it. Blood from his cut lip runs down his jaw. He shouldn’t feel it. He was the one who fell off the cliff after the fight. By all rights he should be dead. He should have given his brother that much, at least.

  He is not happy that he chooses this moment to understand Yn Garr’s words.

  “Come,” the man is saying now. “You will show me where he lives.”

  “Who?” he managed to ask.

  Yn Garr whirls around impatiently. “Hertra Ferral. Your maiden’s father. Or is she no longer a maid now? No matter—I’ll not repeat myself again. He had you followed, boy. Were you too deep in your sleep to hear the rabble his thieves caused when they ransacked my study? Half my books are gone.”

  “You can’t be sure it’s him.”

  “Even if I didn’t know the kind of vermin he is, I’m sure,” Yn Garr growls. “They used this.” And he throws a key, attached to a wooden talisman that once belonged to Enosh’s brother. Enosh watches it fall to the floor and wonders about betraying Yn Garr’s trust or the girl betraying his and if either is more painful than those furious words he had uttered seemingly a thousand years ago on the day of his brother’s wedding.

  “I had her first, bastard.”

  Blind luck, more than anything else, leads him to Hertra Ferral’s home. He is surprised to find out it is the largest mansion along the street. He does not tell Yn Garr that he can confirm this because he sees the girl’s white cat with the bell around its neck licking its feet on her window-sill.

  Yn Garr touches the gate and it unlocks itself.

  Yn Garr’s books are piled in heaps along the main hall. Enosh feels helpless while he watches the man sift through them. “Can’t we just take them all?” he asks, wondering even as he said it how such a task is possible when there is only two of them. Yn Garr tells him to be quiet.

  He shuffles his feet and realizes he is not even worried that anyone might hear them.

  “Where is it? Where would that thrice-be-damned snake-eyed merchant—“ Yn Garr raves, throwing his precious books left and right. He steps on one and grinds it to the floor.

  A sound along the corridor forces Enosh to investigate. He sees the girl disappear into a room and he reaches in and drags her out. She starts to cry out, but he covers her mouth with his hand. “You just wanted to trick me,” he whispers.

  She pulls away and turns to him, wide-eyed. “I didn’t mean to! My father made me.” She places her hands on his arms. “Are you angry?”

  “I am not angry,” he says.

  “Furious?” />
  “I am sad,” he admits.

  “You’ve got to believe me. I really didn’t mean to. I wouldn’t have, only Father learned you were his rival’s apprentice, but—I love you, Enosh. I really do!”

  He wants to tell her she is too young to know what she is saying. That she cannot possibly love that fragment of what he has become. It was the stories she loved, the stories of that young chief’s heir and his courage and his brother and that mother who did not share the colour of his skin. But even if he could come up with the words he finds it is too late to speak. They hear a clatter from the main hall and they run out.

  Hertra Ferral stands on the first few steps of the staircase with a dagger in one hand and a leather-bound tome in the other. His heavy jowls protrude past his thin beard and his eyes are black, black as the deepest night which is not the same colour Enosh had seen the first and last time he had seen him. “If it’s money you want…” Yn Garr is saying.

  The merchant laughs. His voice is thick from too much drink. “Money. Hah! Look around you. I have money. It is the knowledge here I seek, but you and I know that, Yn Garr.” He flicks the book open and the dagger in his left hand begins to glow.

  Enosh does not know what is happening. He has an inkling, but it is not enough. Yn Garr reaches back, not even looking, yet he grabs the girl’s wrist and Enosh realizes he is helpless, a spectator. The dagger in the merchant’s hand flies. Enosh holds out an arm to block the searing hot air that explodes in their midst.

  A moment passes. The girl is lying on the ground with her father’s dagger in her throat. “Your own daughter,” Yn Garr begins, and the merchant giggles nervously.