The Last Dragon: Book Two

CHAPTER SIX

W e paused at the chair on the way out and spoke to the old man, again interrupting a nap in his demanding day. A coin or two changed hands, and he assured us the mage would be properly cared for. We provided the little we knew of the man for his records, the name, homeland, and we guessed how he would prefer to rest for eternity. We had found nothing of value in our examination except the indirect knowledge that he had died without wounds, without bleeding, and alone.

Kendra said to the old man just as we were about to leave, “You told me I wouldn’t find what I was looking for. What was that about?”

His eyes moved to her, then drifted off as he said, “I heard he was a mage. The man had nothing. Not a tool, weapon, coin, or personal belonging. Very odd. He didn’t appear as if he’d been ill. There were no wounds. Whatever caused his death and why he died are not with his body. You won’t find the answers here.”

In the entire city, there seemed nothing else we wished to see in our morose moods. There were no historical districts, sights of natural wonders, or places mentioned in the schools where we’d studied. It was simply a village that had outgrown itself to become a dull, small city located on the route to other places.

At the weapons shop again, late in the day, we found the shopkeeper smiling and waiting anxiously for us. He had modified the scabbards for Kendra and showed them to her, first. The original scabbards had been larger, built for a man. The new ones were narrower, the straps thinner, and they had small buckles instead of ties. Each fitted on the inside of her forearms, and her new loose sleeves permitted easy and fast access.

The two of them played with his constructions as children play with new toys on their day of birth. While she wore them, I saw no sign of their bulk or presence on her arms to indicate they were hidden below her sleeves. She moved naturally. With a swift motion, her right hand seemingly brushed innocently against her left arm, and a knife appeared as if by magic. The motion smoothly continued, as she brought the knife to her right ear and threw—all so fast it was hard to follow as it spun and struck the target.

The stuffed pillow wore a blade, one stuck side embedded straight in. She reached for the other knife and fumbled. That blade fell to the floor as her feet danced out of the way to avoid being stabbed.

“You’re going to have to practice with your off-hand,” the shopkeeper laughed.

Kendra didn’t. She scowled as she picked the blade up off the wood floor and replaced it in the scabbard on her right forearm. After shaking her sleeve down to cover it, she paused as if seeing something deserving of her attention, and in a swift move, reached for the knife. This time, she held it firmly in the center as she shifted it to her right hand and cocked her arm to throw.

It didn’t stick, but from where it struck, a slash as long as a finger appeared and the ends of yellow straw inside poked free. No, it wouldn’t have killed, but the recipient would bleed—just as the shopkeeper had promised.

“Use your wrist as you throw to get more spin. The faster it does, the more chance it will slice something.” He turned to me with a wide smile. A thin cover of dark material was spread over my sword, and he swept it away as if performing in a traveling sideshow. The familiar scabbard looked little different, at first. However, on the rear side, a thin tube of matching leather had been sewn. The four arrows were a tight fit, presumably so they would not spill out at every opportunity. The fletched ends were situated just below the handle of the sword where they would cause no problems when reaching for it instead of the arrows.

The bow was presented to me unstrung, encased in a soft leather scabbard with straps for one shoulder, and a loose belt for my waist so I could bend, sit, or stand without adjustment. Once buckled, the bow rode at an angle from my left hip to right shoulder. I reached for the end of it and tugged. The bow didn’t move.

“Just like a broadsword, you have to lift it free before pulling it forward. It will take two hands or awkward lifting with one.”

I tried again. It came halfway and no more. He shoved it back into place and gripped my wrist. After pulling it part of the way up, he slid my hand down the bow and pulled it the rest of the way. When it reached a certain point, leverage allowed me to pull it forward, and the rest of the way free. A few practice-pulls later and I’d found the trick.

Kendra watched and learned, then placed payment on the counter. She said wryly, “You should be paying me, do you know that?”

“You’re the one wishing to purchase better weapons,” he said defensively. “I charge well for those, but they are the highest quality.”

As in the same manner as when trying to start a fight with me, she said to him in a soft, convincing tone, “But you’re the one who benefits the most. Not only do I pay you, but when Princess Elizabeth arrives here and sees these wonderful creations of yours, she will order you to travel to Crestfallen Castle to make her the same, and probably others. I assume she will also provide you with the authority to begin marking your weapons with the King’s Seal on them as an official appointment. You’ll find each of your weapons will sell for twice what you now charge, perhaps more with the royal seal.”

His face had paled as she spoke. He had no idea that might happen—and my sister was enjoying herself. In my estimation, he hadn’t believed us when we’d mentioned we served the princess. He did now. I put a string on the bow, bent it to fit the other end, and made a test-pull. My actions were clumsy but overall felt good. He had a second quiver to wear on my belt. There was not a place to practice, although I looked longingly at the straw target Kendra had used. An arrow would have gone through like it wasn’t there and buried itself in the wall.

We were loaded down with our purchases. After reaching the inn, we decided to eat and listen to a man with a lute and a soft voice sing in the dining room. Shortly after dark I begged off and went to my room while still thinking about the girl with the red hair.

A gentle knock on my door turned more insistent and finally woke me.

Kendra stuck her head in and hissed, “A mage is at the Waystone at the dragon’s cave.”

I shuddered. “Do we have to climb up there again? In the dark?”

“Maybe. Or, since he appeared up there, what if we let him walk down the stairs and catch him alone at the base or on the road?”

I sat up. “Can we do that?”

“Get dressed. Bring all our things while I go get the horses ready.”

By the time I made it to the stable, arms full, the unfamiliar bow slung on my back and sword banging at my hip, she was leading the horses into the little staging area in front of the door. She took the lead. The moon provided enough light for us to see, but the haze of fog spread the light into a soft glow that removed details. On the empty road, we rode beside each other.

“Middle of the night?” I asked.

“Which means we can get to the road to Old Mercia from the port, and to the cave before daylight. Most sane people wouldn’t dare attempt those steps without sunlight.”

Although it was dark, I turned to see if she was joking. She was not. “Kendra, why would a powerful mage transport himself in the middle of the night unless he has some way to see?”

We rode in silence until she said, “Do you always have to be right? It is so irritating. Elizabeth and I have often discussed that about you, and you really must do something about it. Being right isn’t the problem, it’s the way to express yourself.”

“Has the mage taken over your mind and turned it to mush?”

“We’ll discuss my mind later. Right now, we need to ride.”

“Is he moving or staying up there?”

“Of course, he’s up there. No, he is not moving, or if so, he's doing it very slowly.” She clucked her tongue at her horse to hurry, either to reach the mage quicker or to distance herself from my questions.

Very slowly. Those were her words. As if he was descending uneven stone stairs in the middle of the night. I’d move slowly, too, if I climbed down those stairs in the dark. However, Kendra putting distance between us was not going to work in keeping me quiet. Alexis easily kept up, even so, my next question needed to be shouted because of the remaining distance. “Have you considered he may be up there drawing you to him? If you can sense the mage in your mind, can he do the same with you?”

She rode on without answering or turning to look at me. Realizing the futility of asking more, I fell behind and allowed her to ride alone with her thoughts. She would come around, but not until she figured things out for herself. My task was to point her in the right direction—or to ask endless questions without annoying her, which seemed impossible.

Those are the keys to figuring out the answers to anything with her, or with Elizabeth. I use one question after another until a pattern emerges. The appearance of a mage where there had not been one before posed several questions. The timing more so. To me, it was as if the mage was drawing Kendra near to it, by appearing in the middle of the night atop a mountain where the dragon had been caged and where she had been at the beginning of the day.

She abruptly slowed and turned to me. “You’re right. He wants me to come to him. Not the other way around.”

Only a man who was more of a fool than I would admit he had been thinking the same thing. Instead, we faced each other, our future in doubt. The fog chilled me, but not as much as the things swirling around in my mind like twigs and branches trapped in the waters at the base of a waterfall. Eventually, they would break free of the current, to travel downriver again. The question for them was simply, when. For us, we had not only that to ask ourselves, but why.

The mage had appeared in the one location sure to draw Kendra’s interest. He would expect her to sweep in ready for battle, sword raised. However, the mage, or perhaps others who had dispatched this one, knew that. They wanted her to do precisely what she was doing.

They had killed one of their own hours earlier and then revealed the presence of a single mage where they had kept the dragon prisoner. Now that her mind had taken over her emotions, she became dangerous. She dismounted and walked her horse to the side of the road. “I want to think about this before we ride much farther. Get the blankets, please.”

Short, terse sentences and a flat tone assured me she was already lost in thought and I should do us both a favor and be quiet. I hobbled the horses and unrolled a pair of blankets. She sat, unseeing, on a large boulder. She draped the blanket over her head for a hood against the light rain and hung the rest down over her inactive and slumped shoulders.

My place was to remain sitting beside her, quietly waiting. Her eyes were closed, but she was not asleep. She was deep in thought and remained so until the few stars in the eastern sky started to fade with the coming of daylight.

Kendra slowly stood and turned to face Andover expectantly. Her expression grew intent as her eyes opened. As the sky brightened, a vague form appeared from the mists and approached. It was the last dragon.

The beast flew lower to the road as it came nearer, passed directly over us with a hiss of recognition, and it flew steadily with a regular beat of leather wings. To me, the beast was checking on my sister before flying onward. It rose higher until it disappeared above the fog, following the road to the Port of Mercia. I couldn’t comprehend the feeling of freedom it must feel after four hundred years of confinement.

Following the road, it would have to make a turn to its right soon and cross the barren landscape across the river to near the destroyed city. If it did that, it would again reach the collapsed cave where it had been held prisoner—and where a mage now waited.

Kendra was controlling it! She was directing the dragon to go where we didn’t dare.

The dragon would cover the distance in a fraction of the time we could. Not only did it travel faster, but the distance it traveled was less because it flew a direct route. My mind tracked its progress on a mental map, as an estimate, of course, but probably accurate enough. Kendra’s shoulders stiffened, and that told me the dragon had neared the Waystone, and she sensed both the dragon and mage drawing together.

“He’s gone,” she said as she backed a few steps as if the mage might appear in front of her. Her face twisted into one of hate.

“The mage?” I asked.

“Who else?”

I ignored the bite in her response. The sun chose that moment to lift above the horizon. We stood as immobile as the boulders under us. There seemed nowhere to go and nothing to say.

Kendra finally turned to me. “It’s hard to explain, but in my mind, there was a bright dot that was the mage. Unlike others, like those in the port we killed, or the ones who sailed away, this one was brighter, if that makes sense, more powerful. Worse, it morphed from that spot of brightness into the outline of Stata, the spirit that tried to kill us. It was the same mage, coming for us again.”

“Luring you into a trap,” I said.

I saw the dragon approach the mountaintop, and she screamed when she saw him. She knew him—and hates him as much as we do. She folded her wings to her sides as she attacked. The mage saw her and winked out of existence.”

“That mage must really want to get even with you for turning his dragon loose.”

“Us, damn it all. He wants more than just me. He wants you, too.”

“Why? You are the Dragon Queen. I’m only a poor man's mage with a few small magic powers.”

She smiled for the first time since last night. “No, the Dragon Tamer is less pretentious, and from now on I’ll use that name. I am not a queen in any sense, and don’t wish to be known that way or stir up the royalty in Crestfallen. It’ll be like a trigger for them. We need to think about it and do our research before blindly charging into a fight with our good king. Changing a silly title is little enough to do.”

“There are a few things I’d like to say while you’re willing to have a civil conversation this morning. While you can sense mages at a distance, have you considered that perhaps they cannot sense you in the same way? If they could, those we killed in Andover would have recognized you and fled when we arrived, or they would have been prepared and set a trap. They didn’t even know you were near when you were twenty steps from them the first time we were in Andover.”

She nodded as she considered and agreed. She said, “You’re right. And when the dragon returned to the cave a while ago, I think the mage fled into the Waystone, whatever that means, but he didn’t remain and face the dragon. He left. He can’t stand up to the dragon. Their power is limited.”

“The mages may not know you can identify them from a distance because they can’t do that to you. That’s important. We can use it. Still, he was there to set a trap for you—and the dragon scared him off. Probably he was to sit there and wait until he could locate and kill you. Or us. He may be traveling back and forth to set his trap, and on his last trip there, it was him that piled the stones upon the stairs. We may have barely missed him while he went home to get a good meal.”

We sat under damp blankets that steamed in the morning sunlight, neither of us talking anymore, but the blankets helped warm us a little. There was too much thinking to do and not much talking. Our horses browsed nearby for morsels of grass. The first morning travelers on the road passed us by without speaking, acting as if we were there to poison them if their wary glances and increased speed gave any indication. It was the first time we were treated in that manner, but it was as if they knew we drew danger to us.

The sunshine aside, it felt like the kind of day to wait for evening and hope a warm fire. Our minds were tired and dull, the continuing danger had worn on us more than physically, and while no present danger threatened, we were sure there was more to come.

The main thing for me was to remain quiet and keep still while Kendra figured it all out. She was the smart sibling. Here and there, I managed to contribute to our intellectual relationship, but she was always the smarter one, often allowing me to take credit for her quick mind as a consolation. She often foisted credit and success on me and away from her. It had always been that way.

She turned and said as if reading my mind, “You are stupid.”

Kendra might be right about that, but she seldom came right out and said it. “Me? Why?”

“You’re planning on sitting here under a wet blanket and shivering from cold until you get sick. There are no mages left in the kingdom to harm us. What we can enjoy is a morning ride on fine mounts. At the Port of Mercia, there is a warm, dry inn where we already have two rooms set aside for us, unlimited servings of hot food we will eat beside a roaring fireplace, and a little redheaded slip of a girl that can’t take her eyes off you.”

“We can race to town?”

She stood up and said, “There is no earthly reason to remain here and be miserable when we can do our planning in comfort.”

I whistled to attract Alexis’ attention. She also needed some warmth and food. I said, “Princess Elizabeth. We were going to meet her in Andover.”

“No, she was going to find us, remember? We were going to make it easier for her, but she will ask, and people will tell her where we went. But if nothing else, she will go to the destroyed city of Mercia to look at it, which means she will ride through the City Gate at the port and we’ll hear of her arrival and chase after her.”

The idea of the inn was perhaps the best Kendra had ever had. The moisture of the wet blanket had bled through to my shirt and then to my skin. My pants were wet. My hair hung in limp wetness and water dripped into my eyes making them sting. The world was wet. I was as cold as I’d ever been. The wind picked up, and the air felt even colder.

I helped her mount by holding the reins of her horse, and we rode, our heads bowed down to protect us from the wind directly in our faces as if it wished us to go the other way. My teeth chattered. I wanted something to put over Alexis’ face. I pulled the blanket over mine and closed my eyes. I rode blind, letting my horse pick the way.

The wind picked up, driving the rain almost parallel to the ground, the individual drops striking the bare skin on my face like pelting hail or pieces of sand thrown at me whenever I lowered the blanket to look ahead. The wet, wind and cold fought every step our horses took.

Later, I heard a startled child yelp in fear or pain. The oddity of the sound snapped me to attention, and my eyes opened. We’d ridden into a mother and two small girls with her who were struggling to walk in the same direction. They must not have heard us approaching in the howling wind as we came at them from behind. Kendra’s horse had bumped into the mother, and she had sprawled on the muddy road. A small child knelt beside her. Another watched from a few steps away.

We leaped off our horses and tried apologizing, but the woman simply picked herself up and encouraged her two girls to keep walking with a voice more dead than alive. Her eyes never looked at us. She told the girls to be strong, and all three tried pushing on.

The older girl was thin and limped with each step. She held her forearm in front of her eyes as she tried to move a few steps forward. She couldn’t continue. A blast of wind pushed her back several steps, but she gamely trudged ahead again without complaint. The youngest one was about six and almost as bad off as the other who was eight or nine.

I asked the mother, “Are you injured? Can you walk?”

“I’m fine,” she managed to say. “It’s them that can’t. They’re too young.”

Her intent was clear. Kendra gave me a nod. We could take the girls, one on each horse with us, and the mother could make it on her own. However, I didn’t believe it. The mother was struggling as bad, or worse than the girls. She was trying to send them on so they would live.

Our horses were struggling to stand in the rain and wind, lacking food, and mud sucking at their hooves at each step. They couldn’t carry all of us.

Kendra leaned close to my ear and yelled against the shrieking wind and driving rain, “Want to go for a walk?”

We placed the two girls on Alexis, the smaller one in front, and we pushed the mother up on Kendra’s horse despite their objections. Then we took the reins and walked. One step at a time, heads and bodies bent forward into the wind that pelted the tops of our heads. Now and then, I looked behind to make certain the little girls were still on the horse, finding them also leaning forward, their faces covered with my spare blanket. I took the lead.

Kendra followed Alexis and at times fell so far behind it was hard to see them. I trudged on, slower to allow them to catch up. Stopping was not an option, or I might not have the strength to continue. My legs ached and protested every step. Worst was my ears. They became wet and cold, and the wind tore at them. I pulled my collar so high a stranger would think me a part turtle.

Lightning split the sky. The girls screamed in fear, but weaker—or the increasing wind whipped the screams away and sent them back to Kendra.

The rumble of thunder followed, then another streak of lightning. My head was turned, and I saw the other horse and rider, but not Kendra with the reins.

I stopped and wondered as I waited, ready to rush back and rescue my sister. The horse was a shadow in the gloom and the sheets of rain. Letting go of Alexis to return was not possible. The horse might panic and race off with the girls.

The other horse pulled up beside me, and Kendra leaned down to shout at me. “She died. The mother died.”

I turned and walked without answering. One step. Two. The mother died and now what were we going to do? I didn’t know for the long term, but I did know that if we didn’t get out of the weather soon, we’d all die. There was no shelter, no houses, no hills or trees, and no gullies to hide in. We could return to Andover or continue on the Port of Mercia. Those were the only two choices. We were much closer to the port.

The day turned even darker, and the clouds grew heavier, and we struggled to make headway all day long, despite the previous times we’d made the same trip in a half day. Soon night would fall. The temperature would plummet. Shivering took control of my entire body and wouldn’t stop. Kendra pulled up alongside me and slipped down to her feet. Her hand touched my shoulder, and I knew she understood the dangers we faced. The wind grew even stronger, we were weaker and didn’t need to waste energy to talk, even if we could. She helped me climb into her saddle, and she walked.

We reached the City Gate of the port soon after dark and rode directly to the Blue Bear Inn. Nobody was in the stable to care for the horses, so we helped the little girls to the ground, put the horses inside with food and water nearby, and closed the gate without removing their saddles. We were simply too tired. Each of us took the arm of a girl and steered them to the rear door of the inn.