In the early dawn of the fourth day, Erran was awakened by a puff of warm air across his cheek.
He rolled over and found himself gazing into the dark eyes of a young woman. Waves of brown hair fell over her shoulders and around his face as she smiled at him.
“Good morning,” she murmured.
With a cry, he bolted from the bed and stumbled into the middle of the room.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, laughing, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She sat on the quilt, full trousers spread about her, tight-laced tunic accentuating her figure, and regarded Erran with such frank amusement that, blushing, he pulled his shirt closer and crossed his arms over his chest.
“May I ask who you are, lady?” he said.
“I am Kathil Arret, the Circuit Minister.”
It took him a moment to recall what that meant — the Circuit Minister who tended the shrines at Chesney and similar remote places, and who had been notified of the trouble but would not arrive until — now, apparently.
She rose and bowed, her hand on her heart. “Love and trust, Brother Fox.”
He returned the gesture vaguely. “I was told you were in the north.”
“So I was.”
“Oh.” He glanced around for his clothes and flinched when she moved in suddenly and laid a hand on his arm.
“Come, Brother, I swear I didn’t mean to upset you. Broge sent me to call you to breakfast, but when I saw you sleeping so peacefully, I couldn’t bear to shake you. It seems my waking wasn’t as gentle as intended. I beg your pardon.”
“No, Sister,“ Erran patted her hand and slipped free of it, “I must beg your pardon for my rudeness.”
“All’s well, then,” she declared. “Now, I’ve brought hot water for your cleansing, and there’s hot food for your breakfast. Broge has told me the story, so while we eat, we may discuss this wyvern. Dress quickly.”
She left with a smile and a wave. Erran sighed. What a place Chesny was for waking a man.
A jug of mint-scented water steamed by the basin on the washstand. His things, collected from wherever he had dropped them, lay folded in a basket, with fresh breeches and hose, no doubt Broge’s, on top. Such hospitality embarrassed him, especially after the night’s trouble.
He really had overdone things. His head throbbed, and a dry pain traced the map of his nerves. He washed himself, and as he dressed, he thought.
With the breeches, hose, and shirt, he thought of how the wyvern had flown, raging, out of the wood but then had flown, frightened, right back into it.
As he tied the waist laces of his trousers, still spotted with mud and grass, he thought about ward-breakers and the dark magic of dead blood.
As he slipped the over-worn green tunic over his head, he tallied up the equal numbers of his efforts and failures to quell the beast.
Finally, he laced the trousers tight around his calves, cinched the buckles of his leather jerkin over the tunic, added belt and purse, and tugged his shirt collar and sleeves into place under it all. With this finishing, he worked out what he should do next and what he realistically could do in his present condition.
“You’re not going out like that, are you?” said Kathil Arret when he emerged.
He looked down at himself. “What’s wrong?”
“Your hair, it’s a mess. There’s not a single braid. You’ll catch your death.”
Erran reflexively put a hand to his tangle of ruddy curls. He hadn’t given it a thought, just as he hadn’t thought to trim his beard recently. He must look rather wild by now. Broge, even in the safety of his own home, restrained his fine, light hair within a plaited circlet from his temples to a knot at the back of his head. Kathil’s lustrous mane was laced through with braids and amulets. He recalled combing his own hair out some time ago, but he hadn’t done it up again since. Nutkin normally kept him organized about such details.
“Oh, sit and eat,” Kathil said. “I’ll take care of it.”
She pushed him into a chair and began to run her fingers over his head.
Broge served him a plate of griddle cakes. “Best to let her have her way,” he grinned.
The smell of the food awakened Erran’s hunger, but his eating was complicated by Kathil tugging and twisting his hair with the harsh efficiency of a busy mother. She and Broge talked through the wyvern affair as if Erran were the newcomer.
Broge’s telling emphasized the complaints of the farm animals, the losses and delays, and the attack on the men in the night. Kathil asked what spells had been tried, and Erran let Broge explain the failure of the bread poppets while he worked on getting some food from plate to stomach.
It struck him that Kathil, a shrine minister specializing in cleansing and invocations, knew a lot about beast management, the specialty of rangers. Perhaps she was a student of his art, or perhaps the daughter of farmers, ministering to her own people in this community and able to extrapolate from sheep to dragons.
Her questions, basic but provocative, only added to his sense of urgency, however. As soon as she was done with his hair and he with his food, he pulled on his boots, shouldered his pack, and thanked them both politely.
Kathil opened her mouth, but he left before she could ask to come along. He had already exposed enough people to the Chesny wyvern.
Behind the house and barn rose the steep slope of Tulgi, and before them lay the valley pastures. A brook tumbled down the hill to provide the farm’s water before joining the main stream. Fields and an orchard stretched southward along the waterway, and a rough-hewn bridge let Broge get in and out with dry feet. All in all, Baile Farm was well appointed, but without its animals, it stood in eerie silence.
Erran followed the brook up the hill to the ward boundary. The aura shimmered where the water passed through it. This invisible wall must be inconvenient for the creatures that lived in the brook – another reason to complete his quest.
He quieted his mind, raised his hand in the gesture of the element of spirit, drew the sigil of Pruska in the air, and called her name.
The wolf appeared in an icy whirlwind. “What is your will, Little Master?”
“My friend, tell me the story of the night.”
“What story? I have only an epic tale of prey that never left its burrow.” Her blazing eyes sized him up, and she added, “And of a magician with no power to spare. What can you do today?”
Erran had to grant her the point. “Show me the wyvern.”
Pruska carried him over the tree tops, across the energy dome of the ward. At the summit, she hovered above the rocky outcropping where the wyvern sheltered.
Erran knew the spot by now. He had seen it and felt its aura enough. Tulgi, it seemed, was indeed a barrow hill, as the ravens had said. The cave was marked by eroded, moss-cloaked carvings, bearing the sign of Caillech, the Gatekeeper, the Queen of Souls, most ancient of spirits alongside Aeldreth, the world, herself. These two deities had no temples or clerics, no spells or rites – or perhaps they had all of them. Was it not said every footstep was communion with Aeldreth, and every funeral an offering to Caillech, every birth a boon in return?
In any event, this hill had once been sacred to the Gatekeeper, but like everything else in this world, she had abandoned it, leaving Chesny Wold free for Nimrie’s blessings.
But to which goddess did the wyvern run for shelter now – the Lady of Love or the Lady of Death?
A tiny figure crawled out from under a bush in the clearing and waved a short, stiff arm at Erran. It was one of his bread poppets, a bit worse for wear. Its other arm was gone, and pale lumps marred its crust where the rain had gotten through whatever shelter it had found.
Erran stared in wonder. “How is it still walking?”
“Master,” Pruska said suspiciously, “what is that?”
“An experiment.”
“Tell me you did not put your blood into that thing and set it loose in the woods with a blood wyvern.”
“There were twelve of them when I started.”
Pruska dropped her head down to her paws. “Oh, why, Great She-Wolf, am I bound to this madman? At least it explains why I kept smelling your presence all night long. Don’t you realize that wyvern could have cursed the blood you’re still using?”
“Give me some credit,” Erran retorted. “Precautions were taken. It was quite a complex spell, actually – not that it worked.”
“I was wondering how you managed to burn all your aura so quickly.” If Erran hadn’t been sitting astride her back, the wolf would have shaken herself entirely from nose to tail in her frustration with her reckless master.
The poppet was gesturing towards the cave, indicating that the wyvern was in there. Erran gestured back, indicating that the poppet should lure it out. The poppet gestured refusal. Erran gestured insistence.
“You were made to feed it,” he whispered loudly. “It’s your destiny. It’s my life you’ll be losing. If I don’t mind, why should you? Bring it out here.”
Watching, Pruska remarked, “Life clings to life, even other peoples’.”
More gestures were exchanged, but finally the bread-man pantomimed a heavy sigh and stepped into the clearing in front of the cave. Drawing itself up as straight as it could, it began to recite passages from the Codex of Treasure and Bane, one of the classics of dragon lore and a fundamental exercise in philosophical logic, translated as a dialogue in heroic couplets.
The poppet spoke in a small, grainy echo of Erran’s own voice, barely audible under the wind in the leaves, but the words eventually reached their audience. A growl rose from the cave, growing louder and angrier until the wyvern’s head shot out and its jaws snapped onto the poppet. That quickly, the voice, the rhetoric, and the spell were gone, along with a single drop of Erran’s life force, a morsel hardly worth swallowing.
The wyvern crawled out of the cave, which seemed too small for it. It humped and slumped over the ground in a continuous length, until its wings were free and unfurled from their painful constriction. It dug its thumb-claws into the stones and pulled itself on until the long, bird-like legs could extend. The tail was still not fully in view as it twisted and wound itself among the trees, and the fog of its miasma thickened with its exhalations.
All the while, it was talking. Erran again regretted his failures, because he could not understand what it was saying. It seemed to be complaining. Probably, it was objecting to the recitations of the little thing it had just eaten. Erran suspected it was calling him an idiot, ranting angrily to the rocks and trees about shallow interpretations of the sacred texts of its tribe.
Nonsense is nonsense, the ravens had said. What sense might be made of this madness? Of all the points and counter-points of Treasure and Bane, which had set the wyvern jabbering and tangling itself into knots?
A gust parted the tree branches and cast the shadow of the wolf and ranger across the wyvern’s eyes. Startled, it screamed and began snapping and flapping, as if attacked by a monster from its own nightmares.
“Why are you like this?” Erran said softly. “What happened to you?”
“It is an unclean thing, Master,” said Pruska. “Kill it before it escapes again.”
“How can it escape you? Is there something wrong with the ward? Did the breakers return?”
Pruska laughed the way wolves do. “Those cowardly scum don’t dare. I meant to say this earlier but I was distracted by your so-called experiment. The fault is not in the ward but in the hill.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can scent out any track in any element. I can harry my prey through space and time. I can hold safe any marked territory. But I can’t hold what can’t be held, nor track what goes nowhere. Somewhere inside this hill, the ward loses itself. The land feels tangled and hollow, and I cannot tell where the boundary lies. If that beast does not escape, it’s because it chooses to stay. Take back your energy from me, Master, and kill it before it eats the rest of you.”
Erran watched the wyvern slinking around. It seemed to have forgotten them and was looking for something more to eat.
“I need a new spell for it,” he said. “Keep the aura I gave you for now, and do the best you can.”
“Be quick about it, Master.”
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of An Alchemy of Dragons. Words and images are my original works. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
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