The older the creature, the more likely thisbecomes. A spark might travel far before
it lands. At the place where it lands, its energy will linger. If a follower can reach that place before the spark descends into the crust of the earth, he might briefly connect with the dragon’s spirit. There are benefits and dangers associated with this. A dragon’s fire, as you know, has been said to cure ills.”
“And what are the dangers?” I asked. I looked nervously at the men with spears. Would they fight amongst themselves for the right to have fraas? Or were they simply wary of the dragon itself? Would its spirit rear up and haunt them forever if they dared to commingle with its untamed soul? The creatures, in life, were terrifying enough. How much more fearful would their spectres be?
Before Yolen could reply, there was asudden disturbance amongst the followers. Those at the rear began crying out awarning. I looked back and saw peoplestumbling and falling, children beingpicked up and rushed aside. The groundrumbled to the sound of galloping hooves. Horses were upon us. Arriving at speed. The crowd parted like a flock of startledbirds and I saw an old man knocked
brutally sideways by the leading horse. It was as black as the unlit cave with a mane
that flashed around its neck like a blaze.
Its eyes were full of blood and anguish. Inthe centre of its forehead, at the level ofthe eyes, I thought I saw a stump oftwisted rock, rough hewn at its point andoozing a kind of syrupy fluid. But my gaze
was mostly on the rider, not his mount. Astride the horse sat a thumping brute of a man, with hair as long as the children of Horste. The menace in his eyes was as dark as the fists that gripped the black reins. And though I had no reason then to be afraid of him, a fateful chill still entered my heart. For even I, a boy of twelve, could tell he was mesmerised by the prospect of the dragon. He was hunting more than fraas, I was sure.
As he and at least six others swept by, the force of their gallop blew me quickly off my feet. I tumbled down the riverbank with panic in my lungs. Like the land, the river was harassed by the winter. The water broke my fall; its coldness, my voice. “Yolen-nn!” I cried, but he was
already there, aided by another, stouter,
man. Their sandals gouged lengthy channels in the earth as they clambered down the muddy riverbank after me. A hand took my robe and pulled me from the water. I slithered, legs blue and exposed, into the shallows. Yolen grabbed me and I grabbed him. I held tight to his body while his hand caressed my head. “W-who were they?” I chattered. I was struggling to keep my teeth clamped together.
“They were Premen,” said the man who’d come to help.
“That’s not possible,” I heard Yolen say, but the fear in his voice contradicted his words.
“Trust me, seer, they were Premen,” the
man repeated. And he left us to recover
ourselves back to the path.
I was too cold then to care about
questions. Too shocked to ask my keeper what ‘Premen’ meant. All I yearned for was the fur that the Horste man offered
and that Yolen had wrapped around my quivering shoulders. But as we scaled the riverbank I quickly put away my own misfortune and turned instead to the
people of the forest. The old man knocked down by the strange black horse was lying motionless on the ground. A woman was kneeling beside him weeping. A tall man, rugged and handsome as the hills, looked at the body and touched the woman’s arm. Then he rose up straight and called out loudly, “My father by marriage lies here, murdered. Who will support me in my
rightful claim to vengeance?”
All of the Horste men shouted, “I!” Those with spears raised them high above their heads.
But as quickly as their roar had shakenthe forest, their voices fell away to ananxious mumble. Out of the crowd steppedforth a woman, a dark green cape flowingoff her shoulders. I felt Yolen’s hand
tighten slightly on my arm. It was a measure of protection, but I didn’t know why until the woman dropped her hood and I saw her face. Her skin was as pale as the shimmering moon, the rims of her eyes so heavy with shade that the weirdly violet points within them looked as far removed from me as stars. Bones and bird
feathers hung in her hair. There were more
around her neck and ankles and wrists.
“What is she?” I whispered.
“A sibyl,” said Yolen. “You must stay
away from her.”
The handsome man drew a sword from
his belt. “Hilde, I beg you, put an enchantment on this humble blade so I
might take that villain’s head from his
shoulders.”
The sibyl walked slowly around thebody. “Put away your sword,” she said.
“But the honour of my family is—”
“You will have no
family
,” the sibylhissed, “if you lunge at this man withbloodlust and steel. He will shred you likea pine cone and hang you from a tree.”
“Who is he?” someone shouted.
And I heard the word ‘Premen’ on their
lips again. The sibyl hushed them in dramatic fashion. With a sharp cry, not unlike the screech of a fox, she began to flap her cape. Yolen looked toward the forest. Four dark shapes had come out of the trees. Ravens. Birds I had always admired, though the followers, I noticed, huddled back in fear. The bereaved man
drew his grieving wife aside.
The ravens landed by the old man’s body and emptied their raucous
caarks
at the sibyl. She opened her hands and rasped at them in a language I did not know or understand. One immediately leaped onto the dead man’s chest. It tottered to his face and hopped onto his chin. Without warning, it leaned forward and plucked out an eye.
All around us, the Horste made soundsof revulsion. Even the man who had lent
the fur winced.
I pressed myself back against Yolen’sbody.
What kind of woman
, I askedmyself,
instructs a bird to pluck out adead man’s eye?
Hilde crouched down. She looked at the
staring, muscletorn orb, held tight within the raven’s curving beak. “Find the rider,” she said. “Drop it in his open mouth while he sleeps. Make sure he swallows it – whole.”
And away went the birds on their grisly
mission.
“He will be dead by morning!” Hilde cried. She fanned her arms and spread her fingers like talons. “Tormented by visions
of his own sickly end.”
The forest men muttered their approval for this. Justice, albeit gruesome, was done. They gave praise to Gaia and set off along the river again.
My stomach was churning and my knees felt colder than they had in the water, but I could not take my eyes off the sibyl and her stance. What’s more, she had now seen me. She crooked a finger and beckoned me forward.
Yolen ground his teeth. He did not wantthis. But he could hardly turn me away. Whatever powers my seer could lay claimto, they did not match those of a womanwho commanded birds. “Go to her,” hewhispered, nudging my back.
I stepped up bravely, trying not to look
at the disfigured face of the body on the ground.
“Cave dweller,” she said, thumbing my robe. “Seer’s apprentice. Milker of
goats
.”
How did she know this?
“Yes,” I said.
“What is your name, boy?”
“Agawin,” I told her.
“Interesting.” She cupped my chin. “A name that embraces the voice of dragons.” She spoke it herself, forcing it against the roof of her mouth.
Aagg-
a-win. I smelled her choking breath and half thought I might see fire on her tongue. She glanced at Yolen. “I like this boy. What do you want for him?”
Yolen stood forward. He shook his
head. “I do not wish to give the boy up.”
“What you wish has nothing to do with it, seer. Are you training him in your ways?”
“Slowly,” said Yolen. “He is a simple boy. No use to—”
“Let us see how far he’s progressed.” The sibyl let go of my face and took something from a square-shaped pouch at her waist. It seemed to me nothing but a short piece of bone. But when I looked at it closely I saw it was etched with a number of symbols, the most prominent of which was a three-lined mark that twisted
right around the shaft of the object.
Yolen sipped a little air through his
teeth.
“Take it,” Hilde the sibyl commanded.
But as I reached forward she gripped my
wrist with the strength of a hawk. “Choose your hand carefully, boy. This is a
tornaq
, a talisman of fortunes. Your death and
your destiny are both within reach.” Her piercing eyes stared into my soul. “Hold the charm tightly. Shake it three times with your eyes closed. Then you will tell me what you have seen.”
So I took the charm. And I thought about death and destiny and hands. I milked with both, but favoured the right for all other forms of manual work. Now and then, however, when a mood came upon me, I would dip a piece of wood into the embers of a fire and with the finely charred end draw images on the walls of the cave. This I always did with the opposite hand. For reasons I could not
explain to myself, that was the hand I
chose to hold the talisman of fortunes.
With the first shake, my head began tospin. By the second, I was flying down atunnel in my mind. Images rolled beforeme – people (strangely dressed, and noneof whom I recognised), land (a green hillsurrounded by water), animals (a
staggering
host
of animals, including a pack of bears not unlike the huge brown brutes that roamed the woods of
Druuvendier, but
white
, crossing vastsheets of ice). I saw birds formed in thelikeness of dragons, but kinder lookingwith a softer eye and blessed withastonishing varieties of colour. I saw anegg – large and glowing like the sun. Outof it I knew would hatch a true dragon. But
the oddest sight of all was reserved until last. My journey came rushing to an end at the image of another, still stranger type of dragon. It was small, even compared to the birds, with pretty oval eyes as violet as the sibyl’s and a wide, stubby snout. It sat upright on its tail and two flat back feet. In its paws it held a pad constructed of some kind of parchment and a writing implement that I thought for all the world was a larger dragon’s claw. As I watched, I saw it make a mark on the pad. The same mark that ran around the shaft of the
tornaq. When it was done, it held up the pad and in a voice that hurred like a sweet summer wind it spoke a brief translation:
Sometimes
. All of time seemed crushed
into that moment. I sensed death,
destruction, evil, darkness. I felt the auma of the universe turning.
I sensed a battle coming.
I dropped to my knees in front of Hilde. My hand was weak and my brain even weaker. But as I opened my fingers and the tornaq tumbled out, somehow it turned itself in the air and made its way back to her pouch.
Once again, Yolen threw his arms around me. “Are you done?” he spat at the sibyl.
“Speak, boy, what did you see?” she demanded.
Nearly all of it had blurred, like mistupon the mountains. But I remembered thedragon and what it had said. As my breathcame back I described the dragon’s shape.
All she did was sneer and say to Yolen, “You were right, the boy
is
simple.”
Then she placed her foot upon the bodyby her feet and with one kick sent itrolling to the river. As it tumbled, thelimbs began to crack and break away. Bythe time the water took it, the body hadsplit into ash and small parts. They fizzledon the water before they sank.
Yolen and I looked in terror at Hilde.
“He was old,” the sibyl said. And with the briefest of laughs, she pulled her cape around her and melted into the background of trees.
Yolen quickly took my head into hishands and used his thumbs to prise myeyes wide. “Whatever you saw was afantasy,” he said.
“But—”
“You must let go of it. These women
are deceitful.”
“But I saw a dragon
writing
,” I said. And I bent down and drew the symbol in the earth. The wind stirred the tall green pines of Horste. Yolen spoke fiercely under his breath and put his sandal across the marks. He rubbed them out and pulled me away. “It was a fantasy,” he said. “Do not speak of it again.”
And I had to ask myself as we set off down the path,
If there was nothing unnatural about my vision, why does my master wish me to be silent?
We walked through the morning andinto the afternoon, this time with only theriver for company. I wanted to talk, about
Premen and the horse and the vision I had