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“Will it work?” Shardas twisted his neck to peer at his shoulder.
“It has to,” I whispered.
Into the Forest
Peder No-People had said that Velika was being held in a lesser temple. He clearly did not know which one, and when asked how you found any of these lesser temples, he only looked confused. There were no roads, it seemed; you simply walked in the right direction until you found one, Peder insisted.
And the right direction, according to the nameless little, gray dragon, was in.
“In the mountains, do you suppose?” Luka leaned forward to whisper into my ear as we tentatively moved into the first stand of trees on the mainland. Shardas, Feniul, and Amacarin were flanking us. “In a cave?”
“He claims the caves are poisonous,” Shardas said.
“How can a cave be poisonous?” I rolled my eyes, assuming it was something the little dragon had been told to keep him out from underfoot.
“Easily, if there are fissures in the earth, with fumes and gases leaking out of them,” Luka said. “My sense is that these mountains are former volcanoes like those on the Far Isles and in the Boiling Sea, only newer. It’s possible some are even still active and leaking gases. It would explain why these dragons are dying, as well. ”
I shuddered and he didn’t need to explain any further. The Boiling Sea, on the edge of the King’s Seat, was a vast churning horror of noxious gases and water hot enough to kill a human on contact. I had no urge to investigate the caves here, if they were anything like a land version of the Boiling Sea.
Silent now, we crept through the forest.
Since I had no idea how to emulate the white tattoos or convoluted clothing of Velika’s captors, or if their women even wore such things. I was wearing Citatian trousers and a tunic that Leontes had helped me dye a dull brown. At the very least I would blend into the trees. Luka, too, had blushingly declined the bandage-like wrappings Leontes offered and wore a pair of trousers cut off at the knee and a leather vest.
Looking at Shardas and the others really did give one a turn, though. They appeared small and dull, yet if you looked closer you could see the tree branches being pushed aside by the true reach of Shardas’s head, or his furled wings. My friends appeared shrunken, and yet they were not.
In this manner we continued into the forest, tripping over roots and rocks, with only the filtered light of the moons to assure us we were headed at all in the right direction. Of course, “in” was such a vague bearing that it wasn’t hard to follow. We saw neither scale nor claw of another dragon, and no humans seemed to be in evidence, either, which made us relax more than we should have.
When my bootlace came undone, I told the others to go ahead. It turned out to be broken, and it took me longer than I had thought to knot it and refasten the boot. So when I finally stood up, and found myself face-to-face with a woman with her hair piled high on her head and white triangles marching across her cheeks, I’m not sure who was more surprised.
Before I could even yell she grabbed my arm and hustled me off to the right, hissing and snarling at me in a strange tongue and gesticulating with her free hand. I opened my mouth to shout the alarm, but she slapped her hand across my face to stop me. I writhed, trying to break free, but her hands were like steel clamped across my bicep and face, and I could only thrash and whimper ineffectually as she dragged me over a fallen tree trunk and into a small clearing where three other women squatted around a small fire with a bubbling cauldron hanging over it.
They all looked quite startled to see me, and I could hardly blame them. These were the first women from this country that I had seen, and I knew at a glance that I would never pass for one of them.
They were dressed even more elaborately than the men, and their many-layered skirts, if they could be called such, barely reached to mid-thigh. The bodices were little more than a strip of cloth, but it was wound around the bust several times and knotted in a decorative fashion. Both pieces of clothing were made of coarse, brown cloth, striped with dull red or darker brown. Necklaces, too many to count, hung in tangles from throat to waist, and were festooned with feathers and seashells as well as beads of bone, gold, and wood. Both nostrils had been pierced, as well as their ears, and each woman had at least half a dozen earrings per lobe. Their hair, shiny black and straight, was tied up high on their heads and charms and baubles dangled from it. Everywhere skin showed—cheeks, arms, legs—white symbols had been imprinted on it.
And there I stood, with my hair in a double- dozen braids and wearing a badly dyed Citatian tunic and trousers.
We stared at one another for a long time, and then the woman who had seized me said something and used the hand she had over my mouth to twist my head around to face her. In the moonlight and firelight, she stared at my eyes with an expression of disgusted fascination. Then her companions came and joined her. The youngest of them, who seemed to be approximately my age, made as if to poke my eye.
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“Hey!” I jerked away as best I could: my captor still had a viselike grip on my jaw.
It was then that it occurred to me that perhaps they had never seen blue eyes before, and dyeing my hair and skin had been a pointless ruse when my foreignness was plain to see whenever I blinked. This realization made me sag in the woman’s fierce grip, and she let me sink down on one of the logs they were using for seats.
Their rapid discussion went on around me, while I silently shouted for Luka and Shardas. I was so caught up in this that it took me a moment to realize they had directed their conversation at me. The woman who had grabbed me spoke at length, waving her arms about, but I could only shrug no matter how she yelled.
Seeing that she was not going to give up until I gave her a better answer than a shrug, I decided to pantomime. I made my fingers walk down my arm, and then stopped, tapped one cheek and looked around with a confused expression, as though lost. Then I smiled and shrugged at her. I was only an innocent girl, lost in a big forest.
Who just happened to be dressed funny and have strangely colored eyes.
She didn’t believe me, and I didn’t blame her.
While she stood guard over me, the other three women—all of them younger and, I suspected, daughters or nieces, for there was a strong resemblance beneath the markings on their faces—collected their things. They carefully decanted the bubbling mixture from the cauldron into stoneware jars, which they sealed with red wax and some chanting. There were herbs laid out in rows on a cloth; these were gently tied with string, rolled up, and stowed in leather packs. When all this was done, and dirt poured on the fire to put it out, we began to walk. We headed “in,” but at an angle away from the direction my friends and I had been traveling and I felt my stomach twist with anxiety. How would Luka and the others find me? And if I got free on my own, could I find them?
The woman pushed me ahead of her, hissing in annoyance when I stumbled, guiding me farther into the forest and the darkness. We walked for hours, until I thought my toes were broken from kicking unseen rocks, and I wanted to scream with the tension of not knowing where I was going and how I would get back to where I belonged.
The trees parted ahead of us just as dawn was breaking greenly through the leaves. Before me was a village of wooden huts, peopled by white-marked men and women and children, all sporting strings of beads and feathers, and all eager to come and stare at the strange blue- eyed girl thrown into their midst.
Village Life
The woman who had captured me was a person of great importance, I came to understand. I was taken to the largest hut, which was hers, and all of the villagers save for her three daughters stopped short in the yard as though an invisible barrier prevented them from coming any closer. Looking around the village, I could see people running in and out of one another’s dwellings, spreading the gossip about me, but this hut they did not enter.
The hut
had no coverings on the windows or doors, however, so I was still perfectly visible to the group assembled outside as I was pushed down onto a woven grass floor mat. A finger was shaken in my face and I was ordered not to move, or so I gathered. Then the women went about the hut, putting away the herbs and carefully storing the jars of fresh-brewed potions, ignoring me and their gawking, whispering neighbors.
After everything had been put away, the younger women sat down to eat something that looked terrible but smelled wonderful. Their mother—I had decided that she must be their mother—went to the doorway and pointed imperiously at a young boy in the crowd. He came forward, bare chest puffed out with importance, received some instructions from my captor, and took off at a run.
Then at last she turned to me. Looking me up and down and speaking as though to an idiot, she asked me something. I shrugged and shook my head.
Gesturing at her chest, she let loose with a string of syllables that went on for a full breath. Then she turned and said something about each of her daughters that sounded just as complex. She pointed to me again, and raised her eyebrows.
Gathering that she had just told me their names, and asked me mine, I hesitated, but reckoned there was no reason to conceal my identity. They wouldn’t know me from the next foreigner. “Creel,” I said.
She looked startled, and one of her daughters burst out laughing. My cheeks burned: did my name have some wildly inappropriate meaning in their tongue?
But with a look of unbearable smugness the youngest girl repeated her own name, and then said, “Creel,” before bursting into peals of laughter.
Perhaps not inappropriate, but apparently embarrassingly short, and I didn’t think that trying to explain my full name, Creelisel Carlbrun, would do much to repair the damage. So I just stared at the youngest daughter until she became self-conscious and stopped.
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The mother, whose name started out as something that sounded like Ullalal, offered me some of the strange food on a wooden plate. I ate a little, using my fingers to scoop it up the way they did. It had a rich flavor that I liked very much, until a slow burn started on my tongue and continued down my throat. My eyes and nose began to stream, and I had to put down the plate hastily.
This caused much laughter among all three daughters, but finally one of them poured me a cup of what turned out to be sour milk. It helped with the burning, but the taste made me gag. I thought perhaps she was taunting me further, but when my eyes cleared I saw them all pouring themselves cups from the same pitcher.
By gulping the sour milk in between bites of the spicy food, I was able to bolt it all down, where I sincerely hoped that it would stay. I would need to keep my strength up if I wanted to escape.
The other villagers were still outside the hut staring in, but as my captor and her daughters set out mats and lay down to rest, the gawkers began to drift away. It seemed odd that they would sleep so early in the day—it was not yet noon—but I supposed that they were tired out from their nocturnal herb-gathering expedition. Even more odd was that, before they lay down, they covered their white tattoos with small leather patches the exact size and shape of the markings. As they positioned the mats in the full glare of the sunlight, it dawned on me: they weren’t white tattoos, they were untanned patches of skin! This truly was an alien land. . . .
I had been tied by the ankle to the thick support pole in the center of the hut and given a mat to lie on as well, but couldn’t sleep. I lay still, listening to their restful breathing, and wondering how I would get out of here and find Luka and the others.
And if they were looking for me.
And if they had found Velika.
Once my captors were asleep, I silently tested my bonds. A leather cord had been used to tether me, and the knot was so tight that it would have to be cut; there was simply no way to undo it. I gave it my best try, though, and only succeeded in breaking off a nail so close to the quick that it stung and bled. I lay back, sucking my finger and pondering whether they would cut my bonds so that I could relieve myself (an idea that was becoming more pressing than hypothetical), and if I would be able to make a run for it then.
I had a fairly good sense of direction, and thought that we were west of where I had been separated from my friends. If I went in that direction, I would eventually come out on the shore within sight of the islet where we were encamped, and it would be easy to signal to them. It was a thin hope, but it was all I had.
I had just started rubbing my bonds against a rough piece of floorboard when the midmorning nap was interrupted by a loud clanging. Instantly everyone in the hut but me was on their feet. Mats were rolled up and pushed aside, including my own, from which one of the daughters rousted me with an angry slap on the leg. They cut the leather thong that tied me, but only to loop another one around my wrists and use it to drag me from the hut. It bit into my flesh and I stumbled, trying to keep up so that they wouldn’t tug on it so hard.
The entire population was gathered in the center of the village, where there was a crude bell hanging from a pole. The boy who had been sent running by my chief captor was there, practically swinging from the leather strap that dangled down. The villagers cleared a path so that I could be taken right up to the bell, which the boy finally stopped ringing. Everyone turned to face a circle of beaten earth surrounded by stones half-buried in the ground. They knelt, and I was forced down with them.
There was a flap and rush, and a dragon soared down to land inside the ring. I lifted my head, and someone reached out and pushed it down again. Looking up from beneath my eyelashes, I could see that this wasn’t a dragon I knew. It was almost as large as Feniul, and gray with black splotches on its back and flanks. It surveyed the kneeling villagers with a satisfied expression, then turned to me and the women surrounding me.
With a sickening plummet of my stomach, I realized that this village belonged to the gray dragon, and I was about to be added to its collection.
Ullalal and the dragon discussed me at some length, while I fidgeted and looked for the quickest route through the gathered villagers and into the forest. I was so busy looking for a way to sneak off that it took me several seconds to realize that they had stopped talking and were now just looking at me. The dragon made an imperious gesture with one foreclaw, beckoning me closer, and Ullalal grabbed my arm.
I refused to crawl, which she tried to get me to do by pushing at my legs with one hand and holding my back down with the other. I shook her off and stood, walking forward to stand just outside the ring of stones. I was feeling bold, but not insane. I bowed to the dragon and laid a hand on my chest.
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“My name is Creel. ”
The dragon studied me, scratching at its neck idly. It was just finishing molting some old scales, and a few still clung to its neck and along its back, where it was hard to reach.
Last year I had helped Shardas peel away the scales that had been burned in his dive into the Boiling Sea to rescue Velika, and I was an expert at it. They smarted unless you wiggled them as you pulled, and you had to make sure that they were really ready to come loose before you even did that. It was not unlike easing out a loose baby tooth for humans.
“Allow me,” I said, and reached out to a loose scale. I gave a light tug, felt it loosen, and wiggled it free.
The village was so silent that a door curtain flapping on a hut nearby sounded loud and sinister. From the horrified silence all around me, I was guessing that I had just done something very, very taboo. I looked at the scale in my hand, not certain now what to do with it, and wondered numbly if I was about to be burned to ash.
I had only been trying to befriend the dragon, to ingratiate myself, really. It had occurred to me that if I showed that I meant no harm, was eager to be of use, in fact, maybe I could convince it to take me where there were more dragons. And one of those dragons might lead me to Velika.
> The silence stretched. Then the dragon sniffed me, his huffing breath breaking the quiet. He asked me something, and I shook my head, uncomprehending. He switched to the dragon tongue, and asked me who I belonged to. I understood this, roughly, but refused to claim I belonged to anyone. Besides which: speaking dragon would ruin a human throat. As I had with Ullalal the night before, I just smiled and shook my head.
With reverent hands, Ullalal took the scale from me and placed it in a pouch at her waist. I realized suddenly that she was an alchemist. It would explain her prominence in the village, her strange collection of herbs, and also the others’ fear of her hut.
“I need klgaosh,” the dragon, whose name was Rannym, said.
I didn’t know what that last word was, but Ullalal looked rather annoyed, an expression she quickly covered. I heard a small gasp from the kneeling crowd, and turned my head a little to look. Ullalal’s youngest daughter had dared to raise her head, and she was looking at me with an expression of jealousy and almost palpable hatred. I rocked back at the force of her glare. Perhaps she had hoped to be the new klgaosh. I suppressed a desire to look smug.
“I carry you,” the dragon said next.
Stepping around him, I put out a hand to his side. He being smaller than Amacarin, I would hardly need help in climbing up. But another shocked silence settled upon the village, and the dragon gave a snort of outrage. A foreclaw shot out and fastened around my waist uncomfortably tight. He leaped into the air with me hanging breathless from one claw, while below us the villagers raised their voices in a strange, ululating cry. I pushed my fears aside and concentrated on trying to breathe despite the claw clamped around my middle.
The New Klgaosh
Just when I thought I might throw up from the pressure on my stomach, the dragon descended into the forest. It had been quite disconcerting to dangle above the trees in that way, and I had worried—along with my concern about breathing—that he might lose his grip and drop me onto some spiky branches. But at last he set me down in a small clearing, just in front of a large wooden shed. It was festooned with garlands of shells and beads, and wreaths of evergreen branches that now belied their name by being brown and dry.