“Let’s go,” said Kiggs beside me, and I almost fell off my horse.
He swung himself into the saddle; I handed him the reins, noticing a glint of silver in his hand. I couldn’t ask about it just then, however. My heart pounded frantically. The mist curled still closer, and now we were making noise. Whether he was consciously aware of the danger or not, Kiggs spurred his horse forward quietly, and we hurried together back toward the road.
He waited until we had cleared the coppice altogether, emerging into rolling farmland on the other side, to show me what he’d found: two horse medals. “This was Uncle Rufus’s patron, St. Brandoll: the welcomer, kind to strangers,” said Kiggs, trying unsuccessfully to smile. He did not narrate the other medal; he seemed to have run out of words. He held it up, however, and I saw it bore the arms of the royal family: Belondweg and Pau-Henoa, the Goreddi crown, St. Ogdo’s sword and ring.
“Her name was Hilde,” he said when he recovered his voice, a quarter mile down the road. “She was a good horse.”
We pressed on harder after that, ostensibly to make up lost time, an unspoken anxiety hanging over us at how close we might have been. We passed fallow winter fields and brown grazing pastures. Low stone walls crawled up and down the hills. We passed villages—Gorse, Rightturn, Fetter’s Mill, Remy, a few too small to have names. Their attendant manor houses squatted sternly nearby. At Sinkpond we opened my saddle pack and ate lunch as we rode: boiled eggs, cheese, a dense sweet loaf shared between us.
“Listen,” said Kiggs around his bread. “I know it’s none of my business, and I know I said I don’t judge you for it, but I can’t stay silent, not after what we just saw in that ravine. I know you’re of age to decide for yourself—’an autonomous being, unfettered and free, stepping up to the first agon of your heart’—”
Now he was quoting tragedy to me, which couldn’t bode well. “That’s ‘willful, unfettered, and free’—is it not?” I said, trying to deflect dread with pedantry.
He laughed. “Trust me to omit the most important word! I should know better than to quote Necans to you.” His face grew grave again, his gaze painfully earnest. “Forgive me, Phina, but I feel compelled to say, as your friend—”
As my friend? I grabbed my saddle tightly to keep from falling off.
“—that it’s a bad idea, falling in love with a dragon.”
I was glad I had braced myself. “Blue St. Prue,” I cried, “who can you possibly mean?”
He fiddled with his reins. “Your ‘teacher,’ right? The dragon Orma?”
I said nothing, utterly flabbergasted.
“It didn’t add up, to me, that he was merely your teacher,” he said, pulling off a glove and slapping it absently against his horse’s shoulder. “You know him too well, for one thing. You know too much about dragons in general.”
“It wasn’t such a liability in the coppice,” I said, fighting to keep my voice even.
“No, no! It’s never been a liability,” he said, his eyes widening. He reached a hand toward me but held off touching my arm. “I didn’t mean it that way! We now have concrete evidence linking my uncle and a dragon, and that’s all thanks to you. But you’re going to an extraordinary amount of trouble for this Orma. You’re fond of him, protective of him—”
“Fond and protective equals in love?” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
“You’ve put your hand to your heart,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.
I had unconsciously felt for Orma’s earring. I put my hand back down.
“I have agents, you know.” He sounded defensive now. “They saw you meeting him the other night. They saw you go to Quighole.”
“You’re spying on me?”
He turned rather charmingly red. “Not on you! On him. He claims his father is a threat to the Ardmagar. It seemed prudent to find out more about him and his family.”
I felt light-headed; the horizon wobbled a bit. “And what have you learned?”
His face brightened; we were back to discussing a mystery. “His entire family seems to exist under a cloud of suspicion, but no one will explicitly say what crime was committed. It seems to have been more than just his father, though. If I had to guess, based on the stony silence at the embassy, I’d say—”
“You asked at the embassy?”
“Where would you have asked? Anyway, my guess is madness. You’d be astonished how many ordinary things dragons consider madness. Perhaps his father started telling jokes or his mother found religion or—”
I couldn’t stop myself. “Or his sister fell in love with a human?”
Kiggs smiled grimly. “As grotesque as that sounds, yes. But you see where I’m going with this. Your boy is under scrutiny. If he loved you—I’m not saying he does—he would be taken home and forcibly excised. They would remove all his memories of you and—”
“I know what excision means!” I snapped. “Saints’ bones! He feels nothing for me. You needn’t concern yourself.”
“Ah,” he said, gazing off into the middle distance. “Well. He’s an idiot.”
I stared at him, trying to gauge his meaning. He smiled, and tried to clarify. “Because he’s hurt you, clearly.”
No, that wasn’t clear, but I played along. “Maybe I’m the idiot, for loving him.”
He had no answer for that, although I couldn’t quite take his silence for agreement, the way he looked off into the distance and frowned.
We turned south onto something more sheep track than road. I began to fret about how long this journey was taking. Today was Speculus, the shortest day of the year; by the time we reached the knights, we’d have to leave almost at once to make it back in daylight. Surely Kiggs did not intend us to ride home in the dark? Maybe that was of no concern to an experienced horseman, but I felt I was barely holding on as it was.
We reached a grim old barn that had caught fire recently; the rear of the roof sagged, the back wall was charred and blistered, and the whole area reeked of smoke. Someone had put it out, or it had been too damp to burn. Kiggs stared at it hard, then abruptly turned off the road toward a thicket. We skirted the thicket, which turned out to be a small patch of forest; what looked like shrubs from the rise above were revealed to be trees once we’d reached the low end of the hollow. Entering from the far side, we rode up the middle of the shallow creek until we reached its source, the mouth of a cave under the hill.
Kiggs leaped from his horse, grabbed his pack, and approached the cave on foot. I was not so adept at the dismount. I had substantial difficulty convincing the horse to stand still. Happily, Kiggs wasn’t looking at me. He stood near the mouth of the cave, his hands on his head in a gesture of surrender, crying, “By Belondweg and Orison, we come in peace!”
“Don’t pretend you’re scared of me.” An unshorn, bony-wristed, no-longer-exactly-young man emerged from the shadows with a crossbow over his shoulder. He wore a peasant’s work smock, incongruously embroidered with fruit, and wooden clogs over his boots.
“Maurizio!” said Kiggs, laughing. “I took you for Sir Henri.”
The fellow grinned like a lunatic and said, “Henri would have been ready and willing to menace you a bit. I couldn’t have shot you. Bow’s not even loaded.”
He and Kiggs clasped hands; clearly they knew each other. I stared at my hands, overtaken by a sudden shyness, wondering whether Maurizio would recognize me as the girl he’d carried home five years ago. I had a nagging feeling that I’d vomited at some point during that journey; I really hoped it hadn’t been on him.
“What’d you bring me?” asked Maurizio, lifting his pointy chin and looking not at the pack but at me, half on, half off my horse.
“Er. Woolies,” said Kiggs, following Maurizio’s gaze and looking at me in surprise. I waved casually. He picked his way back downstream toward me.
“Have you eaten?” asked Maurizio, joining Kiggs in holding my horse’s bridle. He turned lively blue eyes on me. “The oatmeal is fine today. Not even moldy.”
/> My feet landed on solid ground just as an old man in a threadbare tabard emerged from the cave blinking. He had liver spots on his scalp and used a nasty-looking polearm for a walking stick. “Boy! Who’s this?”
“I just turned thirty,” said Maurizio quietly, so the old knight would not hear, “but I’m still called boy. Time has stopped out here.”
“You’re free to leave,” said Kiggs. “You were just a squire when they were banished; technically, you weren’t banished at all.”
Maurizio shook his shaggy head sadly and offered me his skinny arm. “Sir James!” he said loudly, as to one hard of hearing. “Look what the dragon dragged in!”
There were sixteen knights in all, plus two squires, holed up in that cave. They’d been there twenty years and had civilized the place, carving out new rooms for themselves that were cleaner and drier than the main body of the cave. They had scavenged and built sturdy furniture; at one end of the main hall stood twenty-five suits of fireproof dracomachia armor, black and quilted. I did not know the proper names of the weapons displayed on the wall—hooks and harpoons and what appeared to be a flat spatula on a pole—but assumed they had some specialized purpose in dracomachia.
They invited us to sit by the fire and gave us warm cider in heavy ceramic mugs. “You oughtn’t’ve come out today,” cried Sir James, who was deaf in one ear, at least. “It’s like to snow.”
“We had no choice,” said Kiggs. “We need to identify this dragon you saw. He may be a danger to the Ardmagar. Sir Karal and Sir Cuthberte told us you were the man who knew his generals, back in the day.”
Sir James straightened up and raised his grizzled chin. “I could tell General Gann from General Gonn, in my prime.”
“All in the midst of general mayhem,” chirped Maurizio into his mug.
Sir James flashed him the fish-eye. “Those were terrible times. We had to know who was who, so we’d have some inkling what they’d do. Dragons don’t work well together; they prefer an attack of opportunity, like the Zibou crocodile, and they’ve a devilish fast eye for an opening. If you know who you’re dealing with, you know what he’s likely to do, and you can lure him in with a false opportunity—not every time, but then, it only has to work once.”
“Did you recognize the one that approached your camp?” asked Kiggs, looking around. “And what did it do? Stick its head in the cave entrance?”
“It set the barn on fire. Our third sally port comes out in that barn; there was smoke pouring all the way into the great hall here.”
“It’s taken two squires a week of dancing around with vinegar-soaked rags to get the smell out of the air,” said Maurizio drily.
“Sir Henri went to see what had caught fire. He came back reporting a dragon hunkered beside the barn, and of course we all laughed at him.” He grinned at the memory; he was missing a number of molars. “It was getting smokier: the barn burned but poorly, being damp and moldy. We split up. It’s been a while since we drilled properly, but you never forget your basic approach.”
“You send the squires out first, as bait,” said Maurizio.
Sir James didn’t hear, or ignored him. “I was upwind, so I was speaker. I said, ‘Halt, worm! You are in violation of Comonot’s Treaty—unless you have the documents to prove otherwise!’ ”
“Fierce!” said Kiggs.
Sir James waved a gnarled hand. “They’re nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards. Anyway, this one neither spoke nor moved. He tried to gauge our numbers, but we’d done the standard numbers bluff.”
“What’s that, then?”
Sir James looked at Kiggs like he was mad. “You conceal your numbers—harder than you’d think. They can distinguish individuals by smell, so you put men downwind and a distracting stench upwind. We brought decoy torches and two sacks of warm cabbages, and made a little extra noise. Don’t grin at me, you young rapscallion! You never let a dragon know how many you are, or where you’re all concealed.”
“That’s a prince of the realm you’re calling rapscallion,” said Maurizio.
“I shall call him what I like! I’m banished already!”
“I’m awestruck that you had warm cabbages sitting around,” said Kiggs.
“Always. We are always prepared for anything.”
“So what did the dragon do then?” I asked.
Sir James looked at me, a fond spark in his watery eyes. “He spoke. My Mootya’s not what it was, and it never was much, but I’d say he was trying to goad us into action. Of course, we took none. We abide by the law, even if the monsters do not.”
That was funny, coming from a banished man who hadn’t been banished particularly far. Kiggs met my eye; we silently shared the humor of it. He nudged Sir James back toward fact. “Was this dragon anyone you knew?”
Sir James scratched his bald pate. “I was so shocked, I hadn’t considered. He reminded me of one I faced, but where? White Creek? Mackingale oast houses? Let me think. We’d lost our pitchman and fork; we staggered back to Fort Trueheart, when we stumbled into the … right. Mackingale oast houses, and the Fifth Ard.”
A chill coursed down my spine. That was the one.
“A dragon of the Fifth Ard?” Kiggs prompted, leaning forward keenly. “Which dragon?”
“The general. I know they all call themselves General—they’re not pack hounds, dragons; don’t take orders well—but this fellow really was what we’d call a general. He knew what he was doing and kept the rest ‘in ard,’ as they say.” He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and finger. “His name, though. That will come to me directly after you’ve gone, I expect.”
I wanted so badly to blurt out the name, but Kiggs flashed me a warning glance. I understood; my father was a lawyer. Witnesses can be very suggestible.
“Squire Foughfaugh!” cried the old man, meaning Maurizio, apparently. “Fetch me the old register of ards from my trunk. I don’t know why I’m trying to wring water from my stone of a head when I’ve got it all written down.”
Maurizio brought the book. The pages flaked and cracked as Sir James turned them, but the name was still legible: “General Imlann. Yes, that sounds right, now.”
I had known it was coming, but I still shivered.
“You’re certain it was him?” asked Kiggs.
“No. But that’s my best guess, a week later. That’s all I can give you.”
It was enough, and yet it wasn’t. We’d come all the way out here to confirm this, and now that we knew, we were no closer to knowing what to do next.
The knights made tea and chatted at us, asking after their imprisoned comrades and news from town. Maurizio kept joking—that seemed to be his primary function as squire—but Kiggs, lost in thought, did not respond to his banter, and I too sat silently, trying to work out our next step.
No course of action struck me as good. Scour the coppice for him? Search the villages for his saarantras? Kiggs couldn’t get enough men out here without diverting them from Comonot’s security. Tell Eskar? Why not the Ardmagar himself, and the Queen? Make the authors of the treaty, the ones most invested in the continuation of the peace, sort this out.
“Are we leaving soon?” I whispered to Kiggs when the conversation died down. Most of our hosts had wandered off for a nap; others stared torpidly at the fire. Maurizio and Pender, the other squire, had disappeared. “I’m not eager to ride after dark.”
He ran a hand over his head and looked like he was trying not to laugh. “Had you ever ridden before today?”
“What? Of course I—” His look stopped me short. “Am I that bad?”
“You’re allowed to ask for help when you need it.”
“I didn’t want to slow us down.”
“You didn’t, until it became clear you didn’t know how to dismount.” He picked at a fingernail, the silent laugh still in his eyes. “Once again, however, you leave me in awe. Is there nothing you’re afraid of?”
I stared dumbly. “Wh-why would you even
think that?”
He began counting off on his fingers. “You bluff my guards and determine to come out here on your own. You climb on a horse as if you know what you’re doing, assuming it will just come to you.” He leaned closer. “You stand up to Viridius and the Earl of Apsig. You ask mad pipers to the palace. You fall in love with dragons.… ”
I did sound pretty crazy, when he put it that way; only I knew how scared I’d been. Sitting there so close to him was almost the scariest thing of all because the kindness in his face made me feel safe, and I knew it for an illusion. For the merest moment I let myself imagine telling him I feared everything, that the bravery was a cover. Then I would pull up my sleeve and say, Here’s why. Here I am. See me. And by some miracle he would not be disgusted.
Right. While I was using my outrageous imagination, maybe I should also imagine him not engaged. Maybe he’d kiss me.
I was not allowed to want that.
I stood up. “Esteemed sirs,” I said, addressing our hosts, who had dozed off on their benches. “We thank you for your hospitality, but we really must—”
“You were going to stay for the demonstration, I thought?” cried Maurizio, popping out of a side room. His head now had a helmet on it.
Kiggs and I looked at each other. We’d apparently been so preoccupied that we’d agreed to something without it registering. “If it doesn’t take too long,” said Kiggs. “It’s going to be dark soon, and we’ve a long road ahead of us.”
Maurizio and his fellow squire emerged, clad all in dracomachia armor. “We’ve got to go out to the pasture to show you properly,” said the other squire, Pender.
“Putting ourselves out to pasture,” said Maurizio with his strange, desperate cheer. “Bring the horses. You can depart from there.”
There was a stirring round the cavern as the old men realized the young ones were about to demonstrate the last vestiges of their ancient pride. Dracomachia was once a formidable martial art; Pender and Foughfaugh may have been the last two able-bodied practitioners in Goredd.
We followed the old knights down the creek into a stubbly field and made a semicircle around a tumbledown hayrick. It had grown considerably colder while we dallied in the cave; the drizzle had turned to light snow, which clung to the stubble, outlining the broken stalks in white, and the wind had picked up. I pulled my cloak closer about me and hoped this wouldn’t take long.