Flight of the Dragon Kyn Read online

  Skava roused, muted, cast off. She flew directly toward the lure, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But too soon. At the last instant she veered away from Corwyn, came circling around, and made a low pass farther away, just above Rath and Myrra.

  I lost sight of her for a moment as she circled again. Then the jingling of bells caught my ear; I looked around to see her flying straight at me, her eyes intent upon my face. I froze; she passed me so nearly by that I swear I felt a feather brush my cheek.

  “What are you doing?” I muttered.

  And then she began to climb.

  She arced out and up, to come overhead, then began ringing up and up into the darkening winter sky. The sound of her bells broke the silence and then gradually faded as she ringed higher and still higher, until I could see no more of her than a tiny white flickering of wings.

  I felt a fluttering of fear in my breast. She was free now; she could leave if she chose. “Shall I call her?” I shouted to Corwyn.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll swing the lure.”

  But at that moment a snow grouse thundered up out of the underbrush near Rath.

  “Ho!” Corwyn shouted. “Ho!”

  There was a faint sizzling noise in the air high above me. I looked up to see Skava scooping to the earth: an arrow point, a teardrop shape, a bird with folded wings. The sizzling built to a whooshing roar, and then … thud! An explosion of feathers as she hit her quarry. Skava pitched up sharply, looking back over her shoulder at the dropping snow grouse, then swung around and settled down upon her prey.

  I stood dazed for a moment. Then I roused myself and sprinted—clumsy, in my shoebaskets—down the knoll toward Skava. I found her neatly plucking out the snow grouse’s thigh feathers. She raised her head and silently hissed at my approach. Corwyn, Rath, and Myrra soon joined me; no one spoke.

  I let Skawa fill her crop, then held out my arm. She jumped to my wrist without complaint. Long purplish shadows stretched across the snowy hills; a solitary star hung low in the sky. And I was flooded with awe: awe at the flight, awe at the death, awe that this splendid creature would consent to share it with me.

  Nothing could surpass that flight, I thought. But that very evening, something nearly did. The four of us were sitting in the mews—Corwyn, Rath, Myrra, and I. Skava perched upon a wooden barrel while I repaired a swivel for her leash. My fingers slipped, and one of the metal rings went flying. I could see it glinting in the stray lamplight, just beyond my reach. My muscles were sore from a hard day’s working, and I felt too tired even to get up off my bench. “If only you would go fetch me that ring, you lazy bird,” I said to Skava in jest. She pushed off the barrel, sailed low across the room, and alit upon the ring.

  I stared.

  It is true that I spoke often to Skava, but it was as with any animal: more for the tone of it than for the meaning of the words. The only word she understood, I thought, was the “come” when I summoned, spoken inside me in a concentrating way, with a certain force of will. But now … Could she have understood me?

  I slipped on a gauntlet and summoned, “Come!” Skava flew back across the mews and landed on my wrist. She did not have the ring; it still glimmered in the sawdust on the floor.

  “She didn’t fetch it.”

  Myrra had stopped working with her clay and was gazing up at me. “She flew to the ring but didn’t fetch it,” she said.

  I nodded. Now Corwyn and Rath looked questioningly at us.

  “I—I am going to try something,” I said.

  I concentrated hard on the ring and said, “Go,” in my mind. I tried to feel that “go,” to summon all my will and channel it in the direction of the ring.

  Skava pushed off my wrist, glided down, and landed again on the ring.

  Excitement pounded in my veins.

  “What happened, then?” Corwyn asked.

  “I think I am … directing her,” I said. I summoned Skava back, then scanned the room, looking for another place she might fly to. The door to her mew was ajar, barely visible in the gloom. “I’ll try sending her to her mew,” I said.

  “Your mew,” I thought. “Go.”

  Skava ducked her head between her legs and peered up at me.

  “Go,” I repeated.

  She scratched her chin indifferently with the sharp talon of one toe.

  Disappointment Hooded me. “I guess it was a fluke,” I said.

  “Try another place,” Corwyn suggested. “Something shiny like the ring. That bell on the workbench, perhaps?”

  A small brass bell, the kind we tied on falcons’ legs, twinkled on the workbench in the light of the lamp. I looked at it, concentrating hard, and said, “Go,” in the willful way.

  Skava pushed off my wrist and alit upon the bell.

  “So,” Corwyn said, arching his brows. He glanced at me again in that way of his, part appraising, part marveling. “This is … interesting.”

  I tried directing Skava to other places as well. She wouldn’t fly to the ones I could not see well. And she never did fetch. But she flew to a brass scale and to a silver coin and to a falconer’s glove. The glove interested Corwyn, for all the other things she had flown to were shiny. “This … directing you do,” he said, “is unlike anything I have ever seen or heard of. It is … a wonder. I would like to know,” he said thoughtfully, “how far you can direct her, and to what sorts of things she will fly. What say we take her out into the field early, without the other birds, and try this? I am eager to learn what she will do.”

  “And I also.”

  “And I,” Rath said. “I want to see, too!”

  “Me, too! Me, too!” Myrra echoed.

  “Very well,” Corwyn said. “On the morrow, we will take our suppers to the northern fells.”

  “I can fetch trinkets for her to fly to,” Rath said.

  “I can fetch berry cakes,” Myrra put in.

  “I think I can get Gudjen to lend us hides to sit on,” I said.

  “You fetch Skava,” Corwyn said. “I’ll mind the hides.”

  Such were the plans we made—but a summons from the king put an end to them all.

  Chapter 10

  And you shall have diversities of gifts, some with strings tied to them, some without.

  —THE GODDESS SKAVA TO FlRST WOMAN, KRAGISH MYTH

  It came in the early dark of the next morning. I awoke to someone shaking me and the light of an oil lamp slickering across my bedcurtains. Gudjen was saying my name.

  “Kara, wake up,” she said. “The king would see you now.”

  “The king?” I asked, stupid with sleep.

  “He would have words with you—now, before the household wakes. Dress yourself. I will come when you have done and lead you to him.”

  Dread lay heavy in my chest. The dragon hunt. Reluctantly, I pushed back the quilts and let the chill air wash over me. I drew on my shift, my best gown, my red cape, then bent to pull on my boots.

  Skava was still sleeping, one foot tucked up beneath her and the other clutching my bedpost. Most days she woke me with her noisy rousing and stretching; it must truly be early now. “Wake up,” I said, drawing on my gauntlet. I unleashed her from my bedpost, ruffling her breast feathers as I took her up. She looked about sleepily. “The king wants to see us,” I told her. “Look alert.”

  Gudjen led us past the row of curtained beds, past the sleeping bondmaids on their pallets, and out into the courtyard.

  Cold engulfed us in a wave. The sky was softly dark and freckled with stars. Yet the pale, watery light of the moon infused the air, illuminating my puffs of breath and the snow-thatched buildings beyond. We followed Gudjen—one never walked with Gudjen, but always followed—over the hard-packed snow in the courtyard toward the high hall. To my surprise we continued past it and turned onto a narrow, trampled track that led through the snow to a stand of birches.

  The king was there, waiting. He wore no crown, yet still looked kingly in his fur-lined cloak, with gold glinting at his fingers. His
wolfhound rose at our approach, ears pricked.

  “Thank you, my sister,” the king said to Gudjen; then, to me, “Kara.”

  I executed a one-handed curtsey, for Skava was perched on my left wrist.

  “How goes it with—what have you named the bird?” he asked.

  I had told him twice before: once, at evening meat, when I had thanked him for her, and another time when he had spoken to me in the courtyard. But the king no doubt had too much on his mind to recall such trifling matters.

  “Skava,” I said and added, “It goes … well,” not quite understanding what he wished to know. “And I thank you again for her; she is—”

  He waved my thanks aside. “Do not thank me. She is what they call a king’s gift, a gift with obligations tied to it. As you have no doubt surmised.” He smiled—a tired smile, I thought. He held out his hand for me to precede him along the track.

  “Come back to me when you have done,” Gudjen called.

  The track, I saw, curved down beyond the birches and then up again into the grazing land above the steading until it lost itself in shadow. Orrik ceded the trodden part to me and broke his own way in the crusted snow beside, while his hound ranged along before us. The king asked if my sleeping quarters suited me and if I liked my work in the mews and if the company of Corwyn pleased me. I answered briefly, for I knew that this was courtesy only and that his real purpose in calling me lay elsewhere.

  After a while his questions dwindled. He stopped at a rocky outcrop and stood for a time looking north to where mountains shouldered into fields of pale stars. Below us lay the valley, lumined in moonlight, smoothed by snow into gentle mounds and hollows.

  The air was sharp and chill. Skava stirred upon my wrist.

  “On the morrow we leave to hunt dragons,” Orrik said. “I and my warriors … and you.”

  There was a stillness in me. I had known this, after all.

  The king turned to me. “I tell you truly, Kara, I do not know how to find them. How shall we go about it?”

  I stared at him, too startled, for a moment, to speak. At last I said, “But I thought that they were there.” I pointed to the distant mountains. “I thought those were the dragonlands.”

  “We know the dragons are thereabouts. Or were, in any case. For that is where Signy’s brother met his death. Yet those mountains encompass a vast territory.

  “My advisers—” The king sighed. “My … brother advises me that now is the best time for a dragon hunt. The dragons, bedrowsed in their winter lairs, Rog claims, can be jolted out of sleep by the clash of swords on shields. They fly”—here the king moved his hand up in the air in imitation of a flying dragon—“fly before they come fully awake, and thus are easily slain.

  “Yet before you came, when we traveled to the dragonlands, we roused no dragons. We saw no dragons. Rog says we had not men enough; it was not yet winter; the dragons were still awake and could not be startled. But I do not know. Dragons are wily creatures, and it may be that this way is of no use.” The king, intent now, leaned toward me. His eyes, though feathered with creases, were clear blue and penetrating. “And so, Kara,” he said, “I ask again. How shall we go about it?”

  It was frightening to have him speak to me in this wise. It was most unkinglike. I had preferred to think he knew what he was about, even when it meant I had to do something I did not wish to. Even though I was afraid.

  If the king had no better plan than this, and all of it rested upon me … I felt my foolish dreams of glory shrink and fade.

  “My king,” I said, “I do not know! I know nothing of dragons. I have never seen a dragon. I know there is a story they tell of me and a dragon and her cave, but I remember none of it.”

  He rubbed his beard thoughtfully. I could not tell whether he were angry or no. “And yet,” he said, “you call down winged things from the sky.”

  “Birds,” I said. “Never dragons.”

  “Some say that birds and dragons are akin. They say that if you can call one, you can also call the other. And then there is … Skava, you have named her?”

  I nodded. Skava roused on my wrist and looked at me as if she knew we spoke of her. Absently, I scratched her feet.

  “Perhaps,” Orrik said, “she can sense them. Falcons do, they say. Perhaps she can—in the way she has of communing with you—tell you where they are.” He paused. “You do commune with each other, do you not? When you call her, she comes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Orrik interrupted impatiently. “Gudjen has seen it in the steam that you will summon dragons for me—and the steam does not lie.” He seemed displeased with me. His hound, pacing restlessly beside him, rumbled in its throat.

  “I saw what Gudjen worked in the steam,” I said carefully, “and I know she believes I can call dragons. But, your grace, I cannot even call an eagle and make it come!”

  “You will make them come,” Orrik said. “How, I do not know, and perhaps you do not either, but you will! It’s in the steam!” He began to pace, then stopped abruptly. “Are you afraid? Is that it?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “I will ring you round with archers. You won’t be in the fray.” He went on pacing, mapping out plans to keep me safe. He would post twenty archers to every dragon; they would form an impenetrable wall; if any dragon came near me, he would shield me from it with his own body. He said something about fishnets and a trap.

  “But—” I hesitated. “But what if I can’t find them? What if I call and they don’t come? And all the warriors will be there waiting, and everything riding on it …”

  I had hoped he would reassure me, tell me I could only try. Instead, he looked out toward the mountains again. When he turned to me, his face was grave.

  “Kara,” he said, “you will do this. I need you. If I march my warriors through the snow, foeless, they will lose heart and mutter against me. If I fail to carry out Signy’s blood feud, I will have forsworn myself; I will lose her hand, and her father may well declare war. If I fail to stem the dragon raids, the folk will turn against me. And Rog … well, I fear what he will do. This is a test of my power—a test of me. If I fail in this, my kingdom will come unraveled, and all that I have worked for will crumble away.”

  I felt the weight of it upon my shoulders—the weight of two kingdoms. I groped about in my mind for another way, a way out. It seemed unwise—unfair—to lay the whole of the burden on me, with such thin signs that I could help. “Maybe the—the shields,” I stammered, “the beaten shields …”

  Orrik said nothing. His eyes did not leave my face. I wanted nothing more than to break away and run—run across the fells and away. But there was no hiding from this.

  “I will … try,” I whispered at last.

  I was not allowed to go to the mews that day. I tethered Skava to my bedpost while Gudjen bustled me about the steading, making preparations for my journey. I followed her from storehouse to storehouse, accumulating provisions: two down coverlets, a bearskin, three fur-lined cloaks, two spare pairs of boots, skins for a tented booth.

  I fretted so to be allowed to talk to Corwyn about Skava that Gudjen sent a messenger to him. Later that day, as I watched the sled being loaded in the courtyard—housecarls and bondmaids bustling about surrounded by a horde of children and dogs, with Gudjen presiding all over—I felt a tugging at my sleeve. I turned around to see Rath grinning at me, Corwyn and Myrra beside him.

  “You need not worry overmuch about Skava,” Corwyn said, “for she is born to the cold. If it storms, stow her inside your cloak, but other times she will be well. I brought you mice to feed her”—he handed me a large packet—“but if these are not enough, I’ll wager she can hunt for herself.”

  Then Rath said, “Hold out your hands, Kara, and close your eyes.”

  “Not more dead mice, I hope.”

  “Discover for yourself,” he said. “Hold out your hands.”

  Smiling, I did as he bade me. There was a jingle, and two round things dr
opped into my hands. I opened my eyes and beheld two silver bells—attached to thin leather bewits.

  “These are beautiful!” I said. “Much more beautiful than the brass ones Skava has now.”

  “I made the bewits myself,” Rath said, drawing himself up proudly. “And … someone gave me the bells, for Skava.”

  “Kazan did!” Myrra said.

  “Shush! You weren’t supposed to tell!” Rath admonished Myrra. “You promised.”

  Myrra stuck out her lower lip, abashed. “I forgot,” she said.

  “You did not—you just wanted to tell.”

  “Did so! I did so forget!”

  Rath sighed, exasperated. “Kara, please don’t tell Kazan you know. I promised I would keep it a secret, but some folk can’t seem to do so.”

  “I forgot,” Myrra said, lower lip trembling.

  Rath sighed again.

  Corwyn smiled, laid a hand on Myrra’s shoulder. “Give Kara what you worked for her,” he said.

  Myrra perked up. “Hold out your hand and close your eyes!” she said. “Maybe it’s a dead mouse!”

  I held out my hands and felt something rounded and solid drop into them.

  When I opened my eyes I saw that it was one of her clay makings, sculpted in the shape of a small bird. I knew it was a kestrel, but was not sure exactly how I knew. It was crudely formed and rough-edged and lopsided and glazed a strange purplish green, but there was something of kestrelness about it.

  “This is beautiful,” I said to Myrra.

  All at once she was hugging me, burying her head in my skirts, and a lump was rising in my throat.

  Corwyn leaned over Myrra to clap me roughly on the shoulders. “Until we meet,” he said. “I will not say farewell.” He pried Myrra away and, hoisting her up, lumbered off toward the mews.

  Rath stood awkwardly, looking as if he did not know whether to hug me or clap my shoulders or shake my hand. “Those dragons better watch out because you’re going to … well, you and Skava, you’ll …” Whatever he was about to say fizzled in his mouth; he turned on his heel and fled.

  I stood watching as they left, with the chaos of preparations going on all around me and a chaos of feeling inside. These are my friends, I thought. There was an aching in my chest—an odd aching—which felt bad and good at once.