Dragon's Keep (2 page)

"Nay!"
screamed the midwife. Before Mother could stop her
she fled die room, ran down the steps and out into the
blinding snow.

Mother told me that her heart raced then,
wondering what had frightened the woman so. In the empty room she tugged the
corner of the cloth away and saw the devil's claw
on my left hand.

She did not scream. She was a queen even in
that hour.

"Maid," she called to the woman
waiting in the hall. "Lock the door."

Alone with me, and silently, she wept.

On the morrow a castle groom found the
midwife's body crumpled in the snow near the castle wall. Her mouth was agape
as if in prayer, or song, or strangled scream. A spot of blood frozen red as a
rosebud lay on her tongue.

I knew Mother was grateful to the storm for
killing the midwife.

A dead woman cannot speak.

The Stolen Child

AD II45

I
was taken by surprise
on Saint Luke's
feast day when the
warning bells rang
out. High in my solar my nursemaid, Marn, and I peered out the window bars.
Marn was as old as the world itself, having been the nursemaid to my mother
before she was mine, and she was near blind so I doubted she could see much at
all looking out my window. I squinted. No enemy ships approached that I could
see, no marauders attacking Dentsmore village far below. I wondered where the
trouble lay.

Marn held my arm. A chill grip and hard, but
her voice came in a whisper. "Red clouds without the aid of sun.
Traveler beware
. The dragon comes." And I saw, seeming
with her very words, the clouds turn a deeper red like the royal carpet rolled
out for Mother and Father on high feast days.

Over the sea the dragon
flew, his blue-green scales bright as
rippling
water, his broad wings pumping. My legs went weak. I pressed my knees against
the wall and gripped the window bars.

Marn had told me dragon tales all my life. I
knew about Nell, and I'd heard accounts of dragon attacks on the north side of
our island where the villagers are wealthy in wheat and over-plump. But I'd
never seen the beast close-up before.
The full of him.
The starkness of him.
Like a winged demon sweeping
over the world.

Outside the
castle
people ran for
the drawbridge. Dragonslayers rushed to the stables, pulled out their gear,
shouted orders, mounted horses.

Closer, closer, came the pounding of the
wings. My claw throbbed in rhythm with the sound, and I gripped
the
bars tighter to press against the pain.

"Look!" cried Marn. Even she
couldn't miss the creature circling Dentsmore below. "No!" she
moaned. "Not our little village! Can you—," she pleaded. "Can
you see the blacksmith's?" Her grown son lived with his family by the
smithy.

"He's flying
farther west." Villagers dove into their shops and cottages as the dragon
soared overhead, the size of him like hell's galleon on a fiery sea. And I saw
how small the dwellings looked
below his
outspread wings.

Our dragonslayers thundered over the
drawbridge, some still donning helmets or adjusting their scabbards as they
galloped full speed down Kingsway Road toward town. Not far below my window
more knights lined up behind the battlement walls, readying their bows.

"Did Sir Magnus put out angelica this
morning?" I whispered.

"Aye, across every
doorway.
I heard him whispering
his charm, 'Step not across, thou evil beast,' to ward the dragon off."

"But if he should fly over and get to us
that way?"

"Step or fly, it's all the same."
Marn said this frowning, not believing herself in Sir Magnus's charm, for now
we'd seen the beast with our own eyes. What was a charm or prayer to him?

I tried to swallow, but could not, for out in
the barley field south of town, the dragon had suddenly dived and captured a
peasant. Man or woman, I could not tell from so far away. I
thought by the speed a man, for he'd run halfway
across the field before the beast cornered him. His death was swift; first the
fire,
then the devouring. But the dragon's belly was not full yet.

Circling the field, he turned and flew at us.
The pain in my claw increased as he came on. I squeezed my finger tight and
tighter to make it stop, but it seemed to press the sharp pain deeper into the
bone.

Down on the road the slayers wheeled about as
the beast winged past. Arrows flew skyward. Thirty or more, and three at
least made the mark. They struck his broad golden
chest like pins
tossed to a high gold-plated ceiling, then fell to the
earth again.

Knights scattered under the raining arrows.
They regrouped and shot more skyward. But the dragon flew from range, heading
toward Morgesh Mountain.

I ran to my east window. He was gone beyond
the trees. Then out he came again, soaring over Kaydon River, the water
catching his reflection as he flew toward our
orchards. It was then
I saw Magda, the brewer's child, coming through
the apple trees,

swinging
her fruit basket. Magda was like a little sister to
me, often running down the halls to greet me with a leaf she'd found
or a toad she'd caught by the pond. And singing,
she was always
singing.

Magda! She must have heard the warning bells.
Didn't she know what they meant?

I raced through the door and down the hall.
At the top of the stairwell, Sir Kent caught my arm.

"Let go! He's
after Magda!"

"I have my orders, Princess." He
pushed me back inside my solar, shut and locked the door.

"Let me out!" I kicked the door.
Pounded it.

Marn put her hand on my shoulder. "Now,
Rosie, the slayers will save our Magda. Don't you be
afeared.
"

I pushed her away and ran back to the window.
Only an hour before I'd had Cook send Magda to the orchard.

"Apples," I'd said. "I will
have them baked and sprinkled with sweet crumbles and no other way." So
Cook had sent the child out with her basket.

The dragon wheeled above the trees.

"Magda!"
I screamed through the bars, but she could not hear
me on the hill. With the dragon closing in she hadn't time to find a place to
hide.

Magda dropped her basket and clung to the
apple tree, her red dress fluttering in the dragon's hot wind, and her hair,
white as thistledown, streaming out behind.

The slayers raced up
the hill, swords drawn, their helmets red as coals in the waning light. But
before they reached the orchard,

the
beast swooped down, caught
Magda in his claws, and winged
skyward
again.

He'd plucked her up as gently as she'd picked
the pippins from the bough.
Then circling once as if to show
us his prize, he winged my Magda out to sea.

Three
days and nights
I
stayed in my solar, wretched and
sleepless.
Father Hugh climbed the stair to pray with me for
Magda's soul. Our castle astrologer, the hated Sir Magnus, stuffed
sticklewort
under my head to help me sleep. I didn't.

Each time I closed my eyes I saw the dragon's
form, and the sounds of his attack echoed in my head. Not the memory of the
warning bells,
nor
Magda's screams nor mine, but the
drumming of my beast mark and the dragon's wings pounding in one time
together.
The strange of it.
The
cruel wonder of it.
That my cursed part should drum with
him,
even as he flew away with Magda. This secret I could tell no one if I did not
wish to burn.

At last on Saint
Crispin's day I quit
ray
room to ride with Fa
ther. The king was often too busy training up his
knights to spend time with his daughter, so when he called me to the stables I
went. Our forest roads were dangerous. Gangs of outlaws hid in the byways
waiting
to
rob unwary travelers, but with my father I was safe.

We rode our mounts alongside Kaydon River, avoiding the apple orchard where Magda's tree still stood, burned black as a
crow's wing from the dragon's fire. At midday, we halted on the high hill
across from Pendragon Castle. A slender sunlit ray falling through the branches
haloed Father's red hair and fell on his blue cloak as sunlight on water.

The tall grass parted
in the graveyard below where the stonemason climbed the hill. Chisel in hand,
he passed the Pendragon
tomb and stopped
to gaze up at the Dragonstone. The monolith
was
carved top to bottom with the names of the dragon's prey. My
father cleared his throat as if to call out to
the man, but no words
lollowed the low rumbling. He patted his horse's
neck instead.

I leaned closer into
Rollo's mane and smelled the sweat along
his
neck. I wished for
all the
world that I could snuff
out the vision of Magda's death as one snuffs out a candle.

"Come, Rosalind," said Father, turning
his dark horse down the path.

Rooks took flight as we
passed the graveyard, the clang of the
mason's
chisel riveting my bones. The dark of my father's eyes was like the sea on
winter nights when it seems nothing living swims beneath.
How
many slayers he had trained up to kill the dragon.
Still the beast
haunted our waking and our sleeping like a demon cut to the shape of our fear.

"It's not your fault," I said.

"Nor yours, Rosie."

"I sent the child out for apples!"

Father flinched then regained the steady look
he often gave when I shouted. "You wanted apples for Saint Luke's feast,
and

there
was no harm in sending her. The
dragon came on us swiftly
and without
warning."

We skirted the high castle wall, riding past
the drawbridge, where the guards hailed us. Galloping up Twister's Hill, Father
raised his hand and halted. On the sea cliff ahead of us, my mother stood with
her back to us gazing out to sea. She often looked southeast in the direction
of our ancestral home, though England had banished our branch of the Pendragon
family six hundred years ago and sent us here to rot.

Civil war waged across the water as Empress
Matilda challenged King Stephen's right to the English throne. It was beyond
my mind that I should have the power as the twenty-first queen to redeem our
family name and end war besides. But Mother had high plans.

Father gazed up the hill at his queen, and I
saw the sadness
slowly lifting from his
face. Putting a finger to his lips, he leaped
from his horse, crept
through the grass, took Mother by the waist, and spun her round.

"Gavin!" cried Mother. "You
frightened me!"

Father drew her close and kissed her. Mother
pulled away. "Our daughter watches."

"Let Rosie see," said Father.
"She's fourteen and she'll be married soon enough."

I turned Rollo about. Father had never seen
the mark that hid beneath my glove, so he couldn't know how his talk of marriage
put a hollow ache inside my breast. Before I left the hill Mother called,
"Ride homeward now. A healer comes tonight."

"She's well enough," said Father.
Mother made her reply as I

rode
off. I knew she'd say my liver
troubled me or tell some other
lie to
justify the healer. I urged Rollo to a canter, raced past the drawbridge and up
to the wooded hills. Avoiding orchard and graveyard, I headed once more for Kaydon River.

God's bones! How I hated healers! Young and
sprightly or old and toothless, it did not matter. A visit meant submitting to
their bloodletting or their stinking toadflax leaves. The healers never saw my
naked hand and so had to guess at my ailment. Some applied poultices and charms
for bone ache. Others burned wormwood and sorrel to banish evil spirits, or bid
me drink Saint-John's-wort to balance my humors.

The last healer, a man
with a braided beard who stank of garlic, guessed I had cramps from my monthly
courses and wrapped
an eel skin around my
knee!

My knee! As if that would heal my hand!

Still worse than any of
these was our own Sir Magnus, who'd
come
eight years ago,
selling
himself as a wondrous
physician. Failing to heal me, he'd stayed on as court astrologer and settled
in the high crow's nest with his books, bones, and potions. The venomous mage
beguiled Mother with his starry predictions and filled her with honeyed poppy
"I'll turn the next one away," I
told Rollo. But I knew even as I said it I would not.

What if this healer had my cure?

At twilight I was called to Mother's solar to
await the healer's visit. As I watched the evening drifting slow to dark, two
swallows darted past the window.