Meghan's Dragon (14 page)

Chapter 40

“Stand down,” Chester shouted, drawing his sword as he moved between Meghan and the soldiers sent to arrest her. “I intend to make Elstan my wife.”

Despite the fact that everybody over the age of eight knew the story of the boy who had disguised himself as a girl in an attempt to slip through the lines and bring help, the audience let out a collective sigh of empathy.

“We can’t do that, Captain,” one of the men replied. “The baron will have our heads.”

“I’ll have your heads if you try to stop us.”

“Let them take me,” Meghan cried, attempting to make her voice as low as possible. It was just about right for an adolescent boy. “I’ve failed my family and everybody who depends on me. I deserve to die.”

“Stand down,” Chester repeated, pointing his sword at the men who were beginning to spread out to encircle the pair. “You’ve followed me through eight years of war, yet you would circle now to stab me in the back?”

“He’s mad,” declared the soldier who had spoken earlier to the others. “Ulric, we’ll keep him engaged while you grab the witch who has stolen our captain’s heart.”

With that, all six men drew their weapons and advanced on the captain in a widening arc, while he backed away, keeping Meghan behind him. Realizing that the uneven odds could only result in one conclusion, Chester drew a dirk with his free hand, and with a cry of anguish, he threw himself at his men. In a matter of seconds, he parried several blows, ran the leader through with his sword, and stabbed his dirk in another man’s chest. But he received a wound on the leg and limped heavily, struggling to retain his balance. The remaining four men surrounded the captain, who kept turning like a caged animal, his sword extended in front of him. Then Meghan leaped towards one of the soldiers and stabbed him in the side.

“Elstan!” the captain shouted as the wounded soldier turned on the girl. He ignored the three remaining swordsmen and charged the man attacking Meghan, thrusting his sword through him. As he struggled to free the gory blade, two of the remaining soldiers fell on Chester and the third grabbed Meghan.

“Captain!” Meghan cried, and with a burst of superhuman strength, the captain left his dirk in one man’s heart, slashed the other, and then brought the pommel of his sword down on the head of the man holding the girl. Fake blood released from hidden bladders covered them all at this point, and Chester dropped heavily to his knees, putting his head against Meghan’s stomach.

“I would have slain every man in the army to protect you,” Chester declared, letting his sword fall to the stage. “They’ve killed me, but let me taste your lips just once and I’ll go to the afterlife in peace.”

As the musicians launched into opening notes of “The Ballad of Elstan,” Meghan turned her head toward the audience and made her tragic confession, “But I’m a boy.” The music swelled, and the players all remained frozen in their positions until the coins began to rain down on the stage. Then they shrugged off their fatal wounds and stood up for a collective bow, after which they began gathering the coins, which included a number of silvers.

“Don’t go away!” Jomar shouted, his magically amplified voice cutting through the applause. “We’ll be playing
The Duke’s Uprising
against Brom’s troupe on this very stage after the break, followed by Laitz’s
Dueling Dragons
and a second showing of
The Stolen Twin
this evening.”

Meghan stumbled from the stage exhausted, clutching at the pendant under her boy’s doublet for strength. She couldn’t believe how much acting in front of an audience took out of her, and she hoped that she would have enough energy left for Laitz’s show. More than anything, she wondered why Bryan wasn’t there to support her. Then she spotted him out on the stage, picking up coins with both hands.

Chapter 41

“You should eat more,” Bryan informed Meghan on the last night of the festival. He licked his spoon clean after polishing off the kitchen wagon leftovers she had procured for him. “You wouldn’t need to squander the magical reserves from your pendant all the time if you had more fuel in your stomach.”

“If I ate like you, I’d look like I was carrying a child and then I couldn’t play Elstan,” she retorted. “Hey, that’s an idea.”

“A bad idea. Give me your pendant and I’ll put a charge in it for you. I’ve got so much energy these days that I have to fight myself not to throw a fireball at the moon.”

Meghan was so tired that she handed over her pendant without thinking about what she was doing. Before she could snatch it back, the bones in Bryan’s hand suddenly became visible as the glow from the intense magical energy generated in his grasp penetrated his flesh. There was a loud crack, and the light went out like a candle doused by a tub of water.

“Oops,” Bryan said, examining the pendant in the dim light from their campfire. “I think it broke.”

“You broke it?” Meghan howled in disbelief, grabbing for the chain. “That pendant is the only thing I have from before I lost my memory. It can’t break.”

Bryan mumbled an apology as the girl examined the piece that remained attached to the chain.

“It still holds my magic.” She breathed a sigh of relief and kindled a small light to examine the pendant closely. “It’s lighter somehow, but the dragon emblem that was almost worn away looks new. How did you do that?”

“Uh, it’s lighter because of this,” Bryan said, showing her the piece of pendant that remained in his hand. It looked like a master craftsman had carefully sawed through the heirloom, producing a duplicate that was half as thick as the original. “It sort of split in two.”

“Let me see that,” Meghan demanded, snatching the piece from Bryan’s hand and holding it next to her pendant. “It’s not broken. It was originally made as two pieces and held together by binding magic. There’s something inscribed on the hidden surface of both halves,” she added excitedly. Then came a long pause before she admitted in disappointment, “I can’t read it. The inscription must be in a secret mage language I haven’t learned.”

Bryan leaned in close and casually created a small illumination orb that cast a bright light on the engravings. “It’s English,” he said in surprise.

Meghan shook her head in irritation at the untranslatable word.

“The language I spoke on Dark Earth.”

“That’s impossible. What does it say?”

In Dragon’s Lair, beneath the tower stair, your path is laid bare, the dragon’s tooth is there.

“It’s a riddle,” Meghan proclaimed unnecessarily. “Dragon’s Lair must be a castle if it has a tower, but I’ve never heard of it. Surely there’s more to all that text than four short lines.”

“The rest of it isn’t English,” Bryan admitted. “It reminds me of something, though. Wait, I’ve got it. I needed to tie a tie once for a funeral, and my dad told me to look in his old Boy Scout manual because he didn’t remember how to do it either.”

“How can you tie a tie? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s like a scarf for men. Nobody wears them anymore, except for job hunters and salesmen. Anyway, I think all of those little hieroglyphics are showing the steps for making a really complicated knot.”

“How could I have missed that,” Meghan exclaimed, staring at the two inscribed halves of the pendant. “It’s instructions for untying a magical knot of concealment and protection. I’ll bet we’ll find it below the tower stairs of the castle.”

“So I did good?” Bryan could smell the herbal-infused soap that Meghan had started using on her hair, and he snuck his left arm around her narrow shoulders.

“Don’t bother me now. I have to memorize this and start practicing so I’ll be able to do it quickly. The tower is at the center of every castle’s defenses, and it’s manned by soldiers day and night. We may come upon the castle as soon as we start traveling. I just don’t know all their names.”

Bryan stood up abruptly and stalked off in the direction of the wagons to see if the older men were drinking beer.

“Thank you,” Meghan called after his vanishing back when she realized he was going. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just sit quietly while she worked, and she missed the warmth that seemed to radiate from his body when they were together.

“Eighteen steps,” Meghan complained to herself after counting the hand movements diagramed in the pendant. She crawled into the tent, secured the front flap, and began to practice.

Chapter 42

Taking down the stage took a little more time than erecting it, but the troupe was back on the road before lunch on the day after the northern festival concluded. The King’s Highway followed the river through a broad valley, and an ancient range of worn-down mountains encroaching on the river from both sides loomed out of the fog ahead. The native shaman walked along with Meghan and Bryan, giving them pointers about creating lifelike illusions.

“I’m still confused about the whole dragon thing,” Bryan complained to Storm Bringer. “It seemed like half of the booths at the fair were selling stuff with images of dragons, but Meghan says that they’re really just mages who take dragon form.”

“Bryan!” Meghan cried hoarsely. A week of performing
Elstan
had taken its toll, especially since the part forced her to lower her vocal register to sound more like a boy pretending to be a girl.

“The young lady is correct,” the shaman informed Bryan. “But the dragon forms taken on by those powerful enough to make the transformation are real. A mage who dies while transformed leaves the skeleton of a dragon, not a human. My own people haven’t had a dragon in our midst for many generations, though there are several with the nations beyond the great river to the west. Our stories tell us that they were more numerous in the past, but new dragons stopped appearing many years ago, and the remaining dragons often fought to the death.”

“Meghan said the scrolls tell the same story about dragons in Old Land,” Bryan said, ignoring the girl’s disgusted look. “Nobody else seems to talk about it much, though I’ve heard there are at least two dragons on the coast of New Land. If they’re so powerful, why don’t they rule as kings?”

“Being a king has its drawbacks,” Laitz interjected. “For one thing, it ties you down to a court and all of the politics involved in running the kingdom. For another, it puts a huge target on your back for anybody else who wants to be king. And if you don’t have any children, it means that one slip can end your family’s rule.”

“When a king dies without children, can anybody apply for the job?” Bryan asked.

Laitz and the shaman exchanged a look that was becoming quite common amongst members of the troupe when engaged in conversation with Bryan. One moment he seemed wise beyond his years, the next he asked questions you’d expect from a six-year-old.

“He’s joking,” Meghan said weakly, though that excuse had worn thin over the last two weeks. When Bryan began asking questions, the only way to stop him from making obvious mistakes was to change the subject. “What are those mountains ahead?”

“The peak to the left, which we’ll be passing before the sun goes down, is known to my tribe as the Dragon’s Lair,” Storm Bringer replied. Meghan coughed loudly to cover Bryan’s reaction to the name, and the shaman continued. “But as your people moved inland from the coast, they saw it as the ideal place for a castle to control the pass cut through the range by the river. We fought a war over the mountain and many lives were lost before a dragon became involved and put an end to it. The northern duke’s castle, Eagle’s Nest, is the result.”

“The dragon sided with the newcomers?” Bryan asked.

“Not exactly,” the shaman said with a smile. “The dragon took the mountain for himself and lived there for generations. My tribe will not go where a dragon has made its lair, so when he finally vacated, your people built the castle that stands there today.”

The four walked along without conversation for a moment, though with the rattling from the wagons and the cries of the children, it was hardly silent. Then Bryan asked, “Am I the only one who’s hungry?”

Chapter 43

“Why can’t we just walk around?” Meghan whispered for the third time. “We could enter through the main gate in the morning, when the carters arrive to remove the night soil.”

“This cliff is a piece of cake,” Bryan replied. “I could climb it in the dark with one hand tied behind my back.”

“It is dark, and I had enough trouble getting up the lower slope, even with you dragging me along.” She yanked on the rope that Bryan had fashioned into a harness for her to make her point, but he was too intent on studying the rock face to pay attention to her words or the tug on the coil around his waist.

“It’s an easy climb to the bottom of the wall, with plenty of ledges for me to stop and haul you up. Once we get there, you can do that sticky thing to the end of the rope, and then I’ll climb it and pull you to the top.”

“That ‘sticky thing’ took months of studying spiders to learn,” Meghan whispered at his feet. He’d started climbing before he even finished talking and was already well above her head. She stared nervously into the shadows above, barely able to make out his form against the overcast night sky. After what seemed like forever, she felt a short jerk on the improvised harness, and she grabbed on to the rope up high, to make sure she didn’t flip over.

Bryan had found a spot to wedge his heels, and he rapidly pulled in the rope, one knot at a time. He knew he was much stronger than he had been before Meghan brought him to her world, but the ease with which he hauled the girl up the cliff surprised even him. In a quarter of the time it had taken him to climb the first section of the rocky face, he had his arms around her and was pushing her flat against the wall.

“Just wait here. I’ll climb to the next ledge and bring you up.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Meghan muttered. “I’m afraid of heights, you know.”

“Don’t look down,” he advised her seriously, and began climbing again.

“I can’t see that far anyway,” she muttered. “Why do you think I save all of my castle escapes and cliff-climbing expeditions for dark nights?” Receiving no answer, she tried to make herself as small as possible on the narrow ledge. While waiting for the next undignified stage of her ascent, she concentrated on the rope, whispering encouragement to strengthen the fibers and repair any damage from scraping against the rocks.

After the twelfth portage, Bryan announced that they were almost to the wall and decided to take a quick break. The sky began to clear, and from the position of the Big Dipper and the North Star, she knew it was well past midnight. Then she glanced down and her knees buckled. If Bryan hadn’t grabbed her arm, she would have fallen.

“Did you look down?”

She nodded weakly, her eyes clenched shut.

“And you say I don’t listen,” he chided her. “Anyway, start concentrating on getting the end of the rope ready so we can make it over the wall. It’s not that high a throw. I could have done it with a grapnel, though it might have made noise.”

“I’m not waiting on some ledge without a rope to hold on to,” she whispered. Her fingers sought and found precarious holds on the rock face.

“It’s my end of the rope we’re going to levitate into position,” Bryan said. “Don’t be a baby, we’re almost there.”

He started climbing again, and after a long silence broken only by a small chip of rock plinking down the cliff, there was a jerk on the rope. Not opening her eyes, she let go of her hold on the mountain and grabbed the knot above her head. Forty powerful tugs later, she joined Bryan on a tiny outcrop below the base of the wall.

“Here,” he said, offering her the end of the rope. “Tell it to cling or something.”

Meghan opened one eye and saw to her relief that clouds had covered the moon again and she could barely see the outlines of the wall above. She grasped her pendant and muttered, “Spider silk.”

Bryan nodded in approval, took the rope back, and tossed it up, staring after it. It came back down on their heads, and it took another spell from Meghan to get it unstuck from their hair.

“Why didn’t your magic work when it was up there?” Bryan demanded.

“The rope end never touched the wall. You have to get the throw right or levitate it into place.”

“I can’t throw that high without a weight on the end, and it didn’t levitate right for me,” he complained. “You’re going to have to do it.”

“I have to be able to see it to levitate it. Wait, I have an idea.”

“Are you nuts?” Bryan demanded when he saw what she was doing. “What if the cord breaks or if somebody sees and steals it?”

“The cord isn’t going to break, and if somebody sees, losing my gold ring will be the least of our problems,” Meghan replied. “Just do it.”

As Bryan levitated the ring with the rope attached up to the top of the wall, she saw that the fire in his eyes wasn’t just an illusion. A green glow was visible on the stones where he was looking.

“What do I do when it’s in place?”

“Stop levitating it, and see if it stays.”

Bryan went one better and pulled himself up a knot. “Good,” he whispered over his shoulder. “But if it comes down and we lose our ring, it’s your fault.”

“
Our
ring?”