Flight of the Dragon Kyn Read online

  Later that day, long after the sun had traced its shallow arc above the horizon, Gudjen led me to the steamhouse. It was dark, save for a fire in the hearthpit, which she had started earlier. I tethered Skava to a perch near the door. Gudjen took a torch from a cresset in the wall, lighted it in the fire, then went round the room lighting all the torches, until shadow upon shadow leapt upon the walls. She shut the smokehole, blotting out the square of stars. Then she went about as she had done the day I came, pouring water onto the hot, smooth stones.

  This time it happened almost at once.

  There was a hissing explosion of steam, and another and another, all massed together to form a billowing cloud. The cloud spread out, thinned, shredded into coiling ribbons that unraveled in the flickering torchlight, then seemed to gather into sinuous strands of tail and wing and claw. And a circle of steamy dragons glared clown at me, transparent to the torches, pulsing their wings, rippling as if stirred by an unseen breeze.

  Sweat trickled down my face; my robe clung wet to my body. The air was hot and heavy and hard to breathe.

  All at once, Skava cried and bated off her perch—no, not bated—she was loose—she was flying. The steam-dragons stretched out, then one by one peeled away from the walls to trail behind Skava as she flew. They blurred around the edges and then slowly broke up, like curdling milk.

  Where was Skava? I strained to pick out her solid form among the steam-shapes but could not.

  And now the steam seemed to be gathering itself into a new shape—a squat, blocky mountain peak from which issued cloudy plume. I minded me at once of the land of many smokes that Kazan had told me of. Skava’s land.

  And still I could not see her!

  “Skava! Come!”

  She flew right through the mountain—punched a ragged hole in it—and landed on my bare fist.

  Her talons pricked my flesh but did not dig in. I stroked her breast and spoke to her softly. Skava burbled in her throat, gently nibbling my fingers. I heard Gudjen opening the door and smokehole, felt the air grow cool and thin, but did not look up.

  “I thought I lost you!” I said. It was foolish, I knew—for where could she have gone?

  And yet my heart still beat wildly in my throat. If ever she were lost …

  But I would not think of that now.

  Chapter 11

  For fending off the bite of frost: a thick fur, a bright fire, a fast friend.

  —KRAGISH PROVERB

  There was revelry in the high hall that night. Orrik took me up beside him on the dais and spoke in ringing tones to the warriors gathered below. Torchlight blazed in my eyes so that I could not well behold the men who, reeking of brew, cheered and clashed sword against shield at Orrik’s every pause for breath.

  And early the next morning we gathered in the courtyard to depart.

  A hubbub of children and dogs, of bondmaids and craftsmen and noblewomen, flocked round the troop of warriors. Although the sun would not rise for a long while yet, the courtyard was stippled with light: the flares from many torches, the moonlit fogs of many breaths. Sweethearts draped war-strips, red ribbons cut from wadmal cloth, about the shoulders of their men, for luck. All of the warriors—including me, including even the king—wore packs bulging with provisions. The men bristled with bows and quivers, with swords and shields and war axes that thumped and clanked as they made their way on ski through the courtyard.

  The largest dogs on the steading had been commandeered as pack animals; they milled about like strange, humped beasts. There was but a single dogsled, for equipage only: the king’s tent and the cook’s provisions and what seemed a landkir of fishnetting. Yet Gudjen had managed to get my tent and some extra furs and boots stowed away on it as well.

  I stood somewhat apart, with Skava on my wrist. The cold air burned my face. This festive mood washed over me, leaving me untouched, like rain on sealskin. I looked about for Corwyn and Rath and Myrra but could not find them. Kazan I saw talking to a hearth companion; he turned as I watched, hesitated, then seemed to move toward me. But at that moment the king emerged from a group of well-wishers and motioned me to come.

  “Here we go,” I said under my breath to Skava as we hastened toward the king. He stepped up onto the loaded sled and pulled me up beside him. Skava let out a little squawk in protest, then subsided and looked curiously about.

  Orrik began to speak to the gathered folk. His words told of blood feuds, vengeance, a stirring venture, and cleaning out the nest of vipers. He spoke of his impending marriage and the future line of Kragland. No word did he utter of his doubts. And I felt strangely alone, as if everyone about me listened to a stirring harpsong, but only I could hear the ominous counterpoint of thunder rolling in the mountains.

  Then the king clasped me on the shoulders and leaned in close. “May fortune attend us—both of us!” he said in a low, intent voice, and I knew he heard the thunder, too. Then he jumped off the sled and helped me down. At once Skava and I were besieged by a troop of children; they draped me with red war-strips until I could not move without shedding. Here was something of the glory I had craved: the war-strips, the adulation. And yet it only increased my unease, for I had not earned it. Perhaps could not earn it. I spoke quietly to Skava, afraid that she would bate. She flapped her wings and gave a short, protesting squawk, but otherwise seemed calm enough, even when one child draped a war-strip about her neck. She tolerated this for a moment, then impatiently tossed it off.

  Before long the crowd in the courtyard began to shift in a purposeful way; the warriors were assembling themselves into a column, with the king and his hearth companions at the head and other soldiers after. I stood aside, uncertain, not knowing where my place should be, until Gudjen gripped me by the elbow and propelled me to the head of the column. “You belong here,” she said. “By the king.”

  Orrik gave a great shout, which was echoed by his hearth companions; we set off through the courtyard. Weapons jinked and clanked; folk waved and shouted farewells. I schussed with the king through the courtyard, around the side of the high hall, up the path. When we reached the rocky outcrop, I turned and looked back. The long line of warriors, pricked by torchlight, runneled out from the lighted courtyard and wound over the hills like a stream from a calm summer lake.

  We were three days on ski to the mountains. At first there was a gay mood to our party. The warriors sang bawdy songs and laughed uproariously, shedding war-strips as they walked, like a flock of duck in molt. Although the hearth companions tolerated my presence, none spoke to me directly. I sensed that many thought I did not belong on this hunt—much less in the vanguard with them. They tolerated me because of the king. “I’m an interloper in their exalted ranks,” I murmured to Skava.

  Some of the men seemed to go out of their way to devise ribald lyrics to discomfit me. Rog especially encouraged them—but kept a safe distance from Skava.

  Kazan, I saw, did not join in the singing; but neither did he approach me. The king had left my side to discuss urgent matters with his advisers and so paid no heed to me either.

  “He’s not my nursemaid,” I told Skava. “Why should he protect me from his own hearth companions?”

  Gudjen had bade me stay close to Orrik—this, not for my safety, but to preserve my status. Yet I found I did not want to hang about him like a lovesick puppy; nor did I wish to encourage those uncouth ballad singers by blushing at their songs.

  “I can’t bear much more of this, Skava, can you?” I said. Skava burbled to me and gently nibbled at my fingers. I let the vanguard pass me by and settled at last into walking near the rear of the column, by the dogsled. Gudjen would have had fits had she known.

  Before long my left arm grew tired and cramped from holding Skava; I tied her jesses to the sledge. She rode along cheerfully, her wings fully extended as she breasted the breeze.

  The first day we walked through farmland—rolling hills dotted by freeborn steaders’ houses and byres. That night we stayed at a farmstead.

>   The next day the steadings grew more sparse; that night we camped sheltered by a stand of birch trees. By the third day all joviality had trailed off as we settled into the grueling, hard drudgery of snow travel. Although walking had warmed my blood before, now cold crept into my toes and feet and would not leave. From time to time I heard laughter or a burst of song from the hearth companions up ahead, but mostly they had fallen silent. The sled runners scraped as they bit through the hard snow crust. The dogs panted, their muzzles rimy white, their harness bells jangling. Yet these sounds had a surface quality to them, amid a deepening silence.

  Now we walked through a hushed world that admitted no sign of human occupation other than ourselves: a world of needlecone forests and rocky scaurs, of snow-drifted meadows and lonely alpine lakes. Sometimes we saw ravens or redpoll, rabbit tracks or wolf sign; once I even saw a gray gyr. But never any humans. None but us.

  The sun tipped above the horizon for only a short time each day, and yet its light lingered long hours in the southern sky: streaks of violet and cobalt and purple, all above a gleaming rim of gold. Stars clustered thickly above us. The waxing moon rose early and set late, bathing the snowy landscape in milky blue light, so that we could see for many landkir without torches.

  Yet the mountains to which we trekked were dark. They had grown until they blocked out the sky ahead of us, until we trod upon their roots. And I could not see the tops of them; they were shrouded in billowing clouds. It seemed we traveled away from the territories of light into a dark country, far from the shining fjords and the comfortable steading houses. There was an ominous feel to this place, as if it were inhabited by the ancient gods, the gods before our gods.

  Late in the day I began to tire. I had tired before, but the tiredness of one day seemed to add itself to the tiredness of the others, and this time I felt that I could not go on much longer. My legs hurt; my breath came ragged and fast. Snow was falling now, pelting my face. My feet felt frigid, but I could no longer feel my toes; they clumped along inside my boots like chunks of wood.

  I looked ahead at the mountains no more, but, head down, saw only my breath-mist and the whirling snow before me. The dogsled—with Skava on it—and most of the men had passed me by. On the other days I had caught up to them when they stopped to clear the dogs’ feet of ice, but now I lagged too far behind. I trudged along in the hindmost fringe of stragglers, trying to quell my unreasonable stirrings of resentment against Orrik for not coming to see to my welfare, or at least sending someone else. You think the king has nothing more to do than to nursemaid you? But then I heard a voice beside me—“Kara?”—and I looked up, startled.

  It was Kazan.

  “Are you—” he began, and then was silent for a moment. “Can I carry something for you?” he asked at last.

  The tears took me by surprise. I felt them welling up, stinging behind my nose and eyes, and I bit my lip hard to keep them back.

  I shook my head, not looking at him.

  I waited for him to leave, yet the schuss of his skis continued; I could see them moving in the snow beside mine.

  “You don’t like me,” he said at last.

  Jolted, I looked up at him, then away. I shrugged.

  “You think,” Kazan said, “that I would use you to entrap birds so that I might enrich myself.”

  This time I looked at him longer. “Wouldn’t you?” I asked.

  Kazan appeared to consider. “If you would like to do so, I would be pleased.”

  I hastened forward, away from him.

  “But,” Kazan said, catching up to me, “if you would not—I would not ask it.”

  I said nothing, but only thrust one ski after the other through the snow.

  “You don’t believe me,” Kazan said.

  “Why should I?”

  Again Kazan appeared to consider. “Because it’s true,” he said. He opened his coat and began fumbling for something in his sash. “Now I would like to give you a gift with no obligations tied to it,” he said. At once I recalled the bells—the silver falcon bells he had given for Skava—and I was a little ashamed of my rudeness.

  “No,” I said, and added, “thank you.”

  But Kazan was already holding out something in his hand. It was, I saw, a dried yellow fruit, of the sort I had tried once at home. My foolish mouth began to water.

  “I like to give these to you northerners,” Kazan said. “I like to see your faces when you eat something with flavor to it.”

  “Our food has flavor enough,” I said. “I tried one of these fruits another time, and it was … too sweet.”

  “Too sweet? You northerners know nothing of sweet. Your cursed cold scares the sweetness out of everything.”

  “Maybe you are so sated with cloying sweets that you have no palate for other flavors.”

  This time it was Kazan who shrugged. “If you don’t want it, I will go.” He kept his gloved hand out, offering the fruit.

  I hesitated. The fruit looked soft and moist and succulent. Again I thought of the bells, which he had not wanted me to know he gave. I reached for the fruit. “You can stay,” I said, as if it did not matter one way or the other.

  The fruit suffused my mouth with a delicious sweetness.

  I allowed myself to smile.

  Chapter 12

  And if your bird grows rapt upon your fist and neither rouses nor eats nor flies—beware, for there be dragons about.

  —THE FALCONER’S ART

  That night we made camp in a canyon. It was a dark, forbidding place with high, sloping walls threaded through at the bottom by a river locked in ice. No longer could we see the mountains before us; we were among them.

  The dragonlands, I thought, watching Skava. She sat tense upon my fist, as if listening. To what? Could it be dragons?

  We had entered the canyon late in the day, gliding along the snow-shrouded river. The king and hearth companions seemed to know this place, for I heard someone call, “See there! Ahead!” and all stopped and looked up through the falling snow to the canyon wall, where a ledge of rock overhung a recessed groove.

  Although it was not a difficult climb on foot, the dogs couldn’t pull the sled up the slope. We had unloaded it, taken off our skis, and packed in food and provisions. Kazan’s companions had whistled and hooted as he helped me haul my blankets and sleeping robes. He made a rude gesture in their direction, then grinned and shrugged at me.

  It was a shallow cave, this place where we camped—only as deep as two men laid head to foot—yet it was so long that all of our number could comfortably fit. I tethered Skava to a tree root that clutched at the overhanging ledge just above the place where I would sleep. She paid me no mind but continued staring up the canyon, listening. I wished I knew what she heard. I wished I knew how to find the dragons through her, as the king seemed to expect me to do.

  I sat around one of the campfires with Kazan and some younger hearth companions whom he had befriended. We talked quietly in the dark, supping on cold dried fish and bread.

  Fear had come to stand like a shadow beside me. Though I talked and ate and even laughed at times, it ever lurked around the corners of my eyes.

  Orrik moved among the clusters of men, pausing to say a word of encouragement here or answer a query there. When he came to our fire, he stopped and sat by me. He told us of the plan, which had been rumored about camp: I would stand on the frozen river and call the dragons, using Skava however I might. They would fly down into the canyon; the walls would funnel them to the fore of the archers, who would shoot them down from beneath the ledge.

  “The canyon will act as a chute, their death trap,” Orrik said. He turned to me. “There were but five of them that Signy’s father saw, and we have a hundred archers. Twenty archers to each dragon! And you will stand downriver from us, so the dragons will be dead before ever they come near you.”

  “But the fishnets?” I asked. “How will you use them?”

  “We have no need of them in this place, Kara.” Th
en, sensing my uncertainty, he went on, “Never fear. I would not put you in the way of danger for a hundred kingdoms.” He clasped my shoulder and looked into my eyes, yet a mutinous thought whispered in my mind: He was endangering me, and protesting that he was not did not change it.

  Breakfast was more cold dried fish and another hunk of frozen bread. I ate: quickly, trying to numb my fear and simply act. It was too late to go back. What would come, would come.

  While I was feeding Skava, Orrik approached. He waited until I finished, then wrapped me about with the skin of a great white bear and led me to a place beneath the ledge where his hearth companions were gathered.

  “She goes now,” he told them. “Take your places.”

  I breathed in deep and would have started down the slope were it not that a firm hand on my arm detained me. I turned around and found myself looking straight into Kazan’s eyes. Dark eyes: grave, intent. He pressed a cluster of the yellow dried fruits into my hand. I nodded, stuffed the fruits into my sash, then turned to go.

  It was only when I was partway down the slope that I realized that no one had hooted.

  All our bootprints and skiprints and dogprints and stumbleprints had vanished beneath the powdery tarp left by last night’s snowfall. Fear lurked at the corners of my eyes again, but I warded it off by trying to guess where, beneath the snow, the footholds were. The moon laid long black shadows across the slope. Many times I nearly fell, and once I did slip and came down hard on my side. Skava flapped her wings to stay upright and favored me with an irritated squawk.

  “I’d like to see you walk down this slope,” I told her, but she paid me no mind—only resumed her rapt watchfulness.

  I trudged slowly out onto the river, listening for the squeak of cracking ice, feeling for a shifting underfoot. It was foolish, I knew; the ice had been strong enough yesterday to hold an army. Yet attending to the ice kept the darker fear at bay.