Heart of Light (38 page)

The carriers backed off, grumbling. The dragon grunted and stood. For a breath, it spread its wings again, then flapped. Once. Twice.

A thin stream of fire shot out at a carrier, engulfing him. The man collapsed, screaming.

The carriers yelled in many languages.

“It is a beast,” one of them said, in English. “A foul creature.”

The dragon's muzzle touched Emily's hand. She understood it was a plea. She stood her ground, between Kitwana and the dragon.

“I will not continue on this expedition,” a carrier yelled in oddly accented French. “Not if that creature will be with us.”

“I will not obey a man who lets an elephant eater live and maybe eat us all,” another said, and spit at Kitwana's feet.

The dragon stretched its wings again. Emily wished she could be sure these weren't death spasms.

Kitwana looked up at the creature, then down at Emily, and his features hardened. For a moment, Emily thought he was going to kill the dragon. Instead, he lowered his lance.

“This is a human being,” Kitwana said. “Whatever else it is, I will not kill it. Yet. Those who do not abide by my decision can leave.”

There was a grumble from the carriers. And then—one by one, and two by two—they turned. It looked to Emily as though the crowd was melting in the warm night air. They dispersed, disappearing into the gloom that surrounded the encampment. Some stooped to pick up lances or bundles of belongings.

Kitwana turned toward her. “They're leaving,” he said, as if she were blind or could not interpret what she saw as well as he could. For a breath, she thought Kitwana would tell her that he was leaving, too. Leaving her alone with a wounded dragon in the middle of wild Africa.

Where was Nigel? Looking around, she could not find her husband. But then, Nassira was nowhere around, either.

Kitwana flung his lance down and looked at the dragon, his brow furrowed in worry. “I don't know how to treat dragons,” he said. Emily's relief at retaining this one would-be protector was so great that she went weak at the knees and heard herself say, sounding very British and calm, “That's perfectly acceptable, Mr. Kitwana.”

Behind her, the dragon collapsed onto the dirt, shaking the ground with its fall. Emily turned around again. Was it dead? But flickers of light ran along the dragon's wings, as it started coughing, writhing and contorting.

“It's changing,” Kitwana said, and pulled her clear as the dragon's great head spasmed back on the powerful neck. Peter's well-shaped head, his classically handsome features appeared. Blood gushed from the lance embedded in his shoulder and trickled from the cuts all over his body. He was pale as death and unconscious.

“We must stop the blood,” Emily said.

Kitwana said something under his breath, but he stepped up next to her, helped her pull out the lance and found a strip of cloth somewhere to staunch the blood. And Emily, trembling and scared, lost in the middle of Africa with a dragon and a native, unsure of where her husband had gone, thought only in wonder and shock that a man was obeying her.

STRANGERS IN THE DARKNESS

Nassira ran away from the camp, pulling Nigel be
hind her. Without thinking, she smelled the night wind, and listened for small sounds in the darkness. She heard the cry of a baby. A cow lowed nearby. Somewhere above, a bird flew.

Nassira was back home. She leapt over the thorny, rocky ground of her homeland, making for the nearest Masai village. She didn't know who they were, and she very much doubted that they would be anyone who knew her, this far from her father's village. But it didn't matter. She was away from dragons, away from proud men of no known parentage, men smitten with British women. Nassira sought the sanity and familiar reassurance of her own people and culture. She ran for a while in silence, pulling Nigel along with her.

She noted that he looked very pale, his odd, almost colorless eyes wide open, his skin a grayish white. His silk pajamas caught on thorns, and the pant legs hung in tatters, showing thorn-scoured skin beneath. The silly man probably still thought that Nassira had kidnapped him.

He didn't even dare speak to her until quite awhile had passed and the noise from their camp had receded.

“Where—” Nigel started. “Where are we going?”

“Masai,” she answered, and lifted her head to listen to the sounds in the night, to get her bearings. Then reaching back, she found Nigel's hand and pulled at his wrist, forcing him to follow as she started running again. She ran until she couldn't run anymore, until her breath tore through her lips in short, helpless gasps. She realized that Nigel was barefoot, and remembered how soft Englishmen's feet were.

Pausing to take a breath, she looked back at him. He was taking deep breaths, too, but he did not complain. She wondered if he was simply that scared of her, or if he had some unexpected reserve of physical courage.

He swallowed and looked at her, and it appeared that he would complain. Instead, he said, “Emily. There was a dragon. I should have stayed. I should have protected Emily.”

Nassira raised her brows. Physical courage, then. Enough physical courage, almost, for a Masai brave. His feet were shredded, and he'd probably just run for a longer time than he had since childhood. But he was worried about his wife, about that caramel-colored English lady who had been so interested in sparing the dragon's life.

Emily Oldhall did not deserve her husband.

“Emily will be well,” Nassira said.

Nassira didn't feel that she could explain that the dragon was Nigel's good friend Peter Farewell, nor that all of Nigel's handpicked carriers were members of the Hyena Men.

“It will all be fine,” she said instead. “We'll go back to the camp in the morning.”

“But what if the dragon—” Nigel started.

“The dragon will do nothing,” Nassira said, and hoped it was true. “Kitwana, the chief carrier, has a lance bespelled to deal with the creature.”

Nigel looked shocked. “How did you know? How did you know a dragon would attack the encampment?”

“We . . . knew there was a dragon. We knew there could be danger. So he had this lance,” Nassira said.

Nigel looked puzzled. “But if everything will be fine, why did we run?”

Nassira shook her head. “I can't explain,” she said, which was truthful. “But you were in great danger.” Which was also true. If there was danger around, Nigel would find a way to be at the center of it.

“Can you walk?” she asked Oldhall, though she had absolutely no idea what she could do if he said he couldn't. “Or do your feet hurt too much?”

Nigel pressed his lips together tightly and nodded once. “I can walk,” he said.

He didn't even ask how far they still had to walk. Nor if they must run.

Nassira walked up a rise, and then down it, following neither smell nor sound, nor even an intuition of where to go, but all of these translated by her subconscious into a strong sense that a village of maybe ten families lay this way.

She went up another rise, down yet another, and then she saw it. Or rather, she saw the darker half-globes, shadowy in the night—the profiles of low-slung branch-and-dung Masai buildings. A cow mooed close by, and the pungent smell of cattle and wood cooking fires was warm in Nassira's nostrils.

To her, it smelled like home. She walked down a relatively smooth path, worn down by the feet of countless herd boys and the hooves of their many charges.

She heard Nigel walking behind her and had to admit that the Englishman showed bravery and dignity both. And concern for others, too. Even if he did look like a fat maggot grown in a sunless cave. His feet had to be torn to shreds. Even Nassira's feet, only slightly softened by her time in London, felt sore and prickled by their run.

He didn't complain, but tomorrow, before Nigel undertook any more walking, Nassira must make sure she applied a healing salve to his feet. Coming up very close to the village, she thought that she must somehow wake these good, unsuspecting people and ask for lodging.

Just outside the circle of low, mounded huts, she prepared to call. But before she opened her mouth, a young man came out of the nearest hut. “Nassira, daughter of Nedera?” he asked. Puzzled, Nassira took a step back and nodded. “And this is the European man you're guiding?”

Nassira nodded again. “We need lodging for the night. My employer can stay in the bachelor quarters, and I'd be grateful of a corner of some hut to sleep in.” She looked the young man up and down, finding him in every way a stranger. “But how do you know me?” she asked. “How did you know I was coming?”

Were they all Hyena Men, aware of her mission and the route the expedition had been following through Kitwana's mind-communications? But the young man smiled. He was a warrior of Nassira's own age or only a little younger, wearing a high coiffure covered in ocher that gleamed red in the scant light. “Your father told us his daughter was nearby, guarding a Water Man.”

“My father?” Nassira asked, her voice catching.

“Here, child,” the familiar voice said, close behind the warrior.

Nassira was so tired. She'd been so intent on the warrior in front of her that she'd missed her father and three other people who had come out of the low door of the hut. Her father stood between two young warriors. In such company, he looked middle-aged and thick-waisted, yet he still gave an impression of suppressed strength.

Was it Nassira's impression, or did more white hair glimmer upon his close-cropped hair than before? As he stepped forward, toward her, she noted that his face looked creased, as though from many long, sleepless nights. But his solid figure was what she remembered from childhood, when he had stood at the door to their hut and waited anxiously for her return from herding. And his dark eyes looked at Nassira with such longing, such protective love—as if all his sleepless nights had been spent waiting for her and hoping she'd come home again.

Nassira ran into his arms.

“Father,” she said. And when her father put his arms around her, it was as though she'd never gone away at all.

LADY'S MERCY

Kitwana would never be quite sure how it came
about. One minute he stood ready to kill the dragon, lance drawn and at the ready. And the next he was helping the creature, and trying to think of ways to keep it alive.