Dragon's Winter (4 page)

Karadur Atani, trembling, strained to speak, to move. But his frozen muscles would not unlock. He lay paralyzed, while the tower room lightened with the dawn. At last, fire flared in the hearth. Grimacing with pain, Karadur pushed to his knees, to his feet, took an unsteady step, another. Tears, like droplets of blue flame, ran down his face.

2

Winter came hard to eastern Ippa that year. Snow lay deep on the roads. Trappers returned to their villages telling of snowdrifts higher than trees, and a thick fog that drifted down the mountain trails, sending goats and deer and a few tired hunters to their death.

Inside Dragon Keep, the mood was grim. All autumn, since the September morning that nobody could quite remember, the morning Tenjiro Atani and Azil Aumson vanished from the Keep, Karadur Atani had kept to himself. His soldiers watched him silently, unhappily. Only Lorimir Ness, who had watched, frozen and helpless, from the rampart as Tenjiro Atani and the harpist left the dormant Keep and rode slowly north, dared to speak of it. The glare Karadur turned on him sent him to the floor as if he had been clubbed. It took some time before he could stand.

Early in March the following year, a yellow-eyed, soft-voiced stranger appeared in Sleeth village. He came from Ujo, in Nakase, and had been born in a village named Nyo, he said, which lay south, at the border between Nakase and Issho, where the Estre River poured into the Crystal Lake.

The folk of Sleeth who heard these names shrugged, for few of them had ever been south of the domain. They were courteous, but wary, fearing that the stranger would turn out to be a ne’er-do-well, or even an outlaw banished from his home village.

But the yellow-eyed traveler seemed to be neither of these. His name was long and foreign. “Hard to pronounce,” he agreed. “Most people call me Wolf.” He touched his hair, which was thick and dark and tipped with silver.

He asked at the smithy if anyone needed help, especially with wood. “I am handy with an ax” he said, “and was counted a good carpenter in Ujo.” Ono the smith, who had little use for braggarts, and though he was over sixty, still had forearms the size of hams, handed him a blunted ax head and told him to put an edge on it, for a man who could not mend his own tools would not survive in the mountains. Wolf put a neat edge on the ax head. Within a week, he had a bed next to the forge and work aplenty, mending and building, for old Gerain, who had been the village carpenter for fifty-odd years, had started to get stiff in his hands, and none of his three sons could tell birch from maple.

Wolf was a lean, quiet man, not old, despite his silver-tipped hair. The village men liked him: he could drink, and seemed to enjoy sitting in the common room at the Red Oak, listening to village tales, and occasionally telling one of his own. He told excellent stories. He had served the Lemininkai, in Ujo, and lived in Skyeggo, in far-off Kameni, beside the unimaginable ocean. He had sailed on a ship around the Gate of Winds to Chuyo, and even gone raiding with the men of Issho across the wastelands into Isoj. The girls guessed his age, giggling, and made up their own tales about him. The women found his yellow eyes attractive, and wondered why he had come north alone. He lived all spring in the back room of the smithy, and seemed content with it. Rain, Ono’s wife, was happy to set a third place at the table, but neither she nor Ono asked questions, and Wolf was free to come and go.

One day in early June he was sitting outside the smithy in the sunlight, knife in hand, when Thea, daughter of Serret the ale-maker, stopped to watch him work. Wolf knew who she was. She was apprenticed to Ferrell the weaver; he had once carved a new leg for her loom. He had asked Ono about her, for she seemed gentle and thoughtful, and she was clearly a woman, near twenty, well old enough to be wed.

“Did you see her face?” the smith asked. He splayed a hand across his right cheek. “She is marked; a birth scar. We call them dragon scars.”

“So?”

Ono explained that people so marked rarely wed, for it was feared that their children might be deformed. Instead, they were early apprenticed, and taught some trade. “A pity,” the old man said. “She’s a fine woman.”

But Thea did not pity herself. She enjoyed weaving: it gave her pleasure to know that she had a skill that was her own, and she treasured the solitude it gave her. She had long grown used to the notion that she would not be wed. It did not trouble her, save sometimes, when she watched boys and girls tease each other in spring, and saw how sometimes a boy would gaze at a girl a certain way, as if he might cease to breathe if she did not look at him. She liked the stranger from the south. He was neat-handed, as she was, and quiet, and he greeted her by name, respectfully, as he might have greeted Rain or Serret, her mother, who was also Rain’s sister.

“May I watch?” she asked. He nodded and did not halt his work. Wood curls dropped to the ground. She stood silently for a while, enjoying the sun on her hair, the movement of Wolf’s hands, and the smell of the fresh wood shavings.

Finally she said, “What are you making?”

“A toy for Lisbe.” Lisbe was Gerain’s youngest grandchild; she was four. He rotated it and she saw the forked tail, the neck, the rearing proud head.

“It’s a dragon.” She was delighted. “Where are its wings?”

“I will carve them separately, and joint them on, so they can move.” He mimed with one hand the slow powerful beat of a dragon’s wings.

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No.” He moved on the bench so that she could sit beside him. “Have you?” The irregular purplish scar traced across her upper cheek like lace, and ran up her temple into her black hair. She wore her hair loose, tied back with a strand of azure wool. It fell to her waist. Her eyes were hazel.

“They say I have. My uncle held me on his shoulder one day when Kojiro the Black Dragon, the lord Karadur’s father, flew over the village. But I was only two, and do not remember. No one has ever seen our lord Karadur take dragon form.”

“Why not, I wonder?” Wolf asked. It had come up before, but only in the kind of conversation that did not admit questions.

Thea said cautiously, “I don’t
know.
But they say our lord’s brother was a sorcerer, and when he left the castle last year, it was in anger. Tallis, my cousin Nora’s husband, is a guard at the Keep; he says that Tenjiro Atani laid a curse on his brother. Lirith died that day, and no one who was at the Keep remembers how, or knows where Tenjiro Atani is.”

“Who was Lirith?”

“Lirith Cordis. She was eldest of all the castle women. She birthed the brothers. She was like a mother to Karadur and Tenjiro.”

They sat in companionable silence for a while. Then Thea recollected her errand, a visit to Felicia, her sister, for whom she was making a baby blanket, and she left.

Three days later Thea was seated at her loom when someone knocked at her door. She crossed to the door and opened it. Wolf stood in the doorway, holding a delicate wooden comb, such as a woman might wear in her hair for decoration. On its crown, above the narrow tines, romped a dragon with a gleaming seashell eye. “For you,” he said, and laid it her palm.

She wore it through the village streets the next day. A week later Wolf returned from a day’s work at the mill, where he had rebuilt a rotten stair, to find a cloak on his bed. It was soft and warm, of a fine thick wool that he knew to be the best that one could find in Castria Market. It was grey, with red threads running through it like the red grain of yew heartwood. He stroked it, smiling.

That night, sitting alone with a candle, he wrote a letter to his friend Terrill Chernico, called Hawk, who lived south, in Nakase county, in the city of Ujo:

I seem to have made a place for myself in Sleeth. There is work to do, and I have a home, of sorts, with the blacksmith and his wife. They are kind people. The village reminds me of Nyo, except that it is not so big, and I am not forever falling over brothers and sisters and cousins. It is not at all like Ujo.

As
you know, they call this Dragon’s Country. The lord of this region is Karadur Atani. He is indeed changeling, as we thought, and liege to the villages near it and to the lands south of the mountains by half a hundred miles. There’s mystery here: they tell me he has never taken dragon-form, and I have heard a story that his estranged brother, who is reputed to be a sorcerer, laid a curse on him. His father, Kojiro the Black Dragon, who was famous for his rages, burned the city of Mako. I have heard a dozen stories of Kojiro Atani’s temper, and none at all of the son’s. In fact, they rarely talk about him.

The hunting is good. You would like it. The ale is good, too—excellent, in fact The brewer is a woman named Serret. She has a daughter, Thea the weaver, with whom I am somewhat friendly.

If you see our friend Bear, give him my love.

After a while it became not uncommon for Wolf the carpenter and Thea the weaver to be seen together in Sleeth, walking, or sitting in the Red Oak, side by side, while the younger men drank and told hunting stories and wrestled. When summer turned hot, Wolf left Sleeth for a while, and not even Ono and Rain knew where he had gone. Then word came back that he had gone into the hills north of the village, and found a sheltered spring-fed meadow between Sleeth and Chingura, and was felling trees to build a house. The men from Sleeth whose homes or barns or workshops he had built or repaired went to help him. When asked, he explained that he was no farmer, but he had done some fur-trapping once upon a time, and thought he might like to try that life again, if he had a house to come home to.

The morning after midsummer festival, Wolf returned to Sleeth, and asked Thea to go walking with him. She left her loom with its work unfinished, and took her cloak from its peg. It was a half day’s climb to the hollow, but Thea was a mountain woman, and she had roamed these hills all her life. They took the slow way round, dawdling by the river, and came to the house at sunset. It was small and neat, built in northern fashion, with common room and kitchen below, and sleeping chambers above. There was a pen for sheep, a pantry, and a little room off the pantry with a window that looked west, across the meadow, and a room upstairs that was not a sleeping loft. It had a window. Thea pictured her loom into it, and herself sitting at it, looking at the meadow, and a hawk flying.

“It’s a fine house,” she said.

They went outside, and Wolf showed her the spring, and the root cellar, and the berry bushes near it, and the path he had cleared between spring and house. “Next month I’ll dig a well.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“In spring the meadow is covered with yellow flowers.”

Thea nodded, trying not to smile, for she knew he was having trouble with the words.

“There is something else,” he said.

And suddenly, with a shimmer in the air like silver smoke, the man who stood across from her, with silver-tipped hair and dark eyes and long, elegant hands, was gone. She stood six feet from a lean black wolf. It gazed at her coldly from amber-yellow eyes. The shimmer came again, and Wolf was standing where the wolf had stood.

He was waiting for her to move, so she did. She walked to him and fitted her hand to his. “If we have children,” she said, “will they be wolves or human?”

She felt him breathe then, and his fingers tightened on hers. “They may be neither. Or both.”

They were wed that September, a week after harvest moon. The morning of the wedding, after breakfast, during which Rain had cried, Wolf walked with Ono to the forge. He said, a little formally, “I have not thanked you for your welcome of me. Many men would not have been so friendly to a stranger.”

“Most strangers are not so handy with an ax.”

“If ever you need me, for any reason, or no reason at all, I will come. I am not so far away that word cannot be sent. Anyway, my work will bring me here. You will see me often enough.”

Ono nodded. They went into the smithy. Corwin was working the bellows. He was fifteen, a strong lad, Ono’s brother’s son, and the pallet that had been Wolf’s was now his. Ono went to the rear of the smithy. When he came out again, he held a leather-sheathed sword. He handed it to Wolf. Wolf unsheathed it. It came easily, with only a little initial resistance. The blade gleamed in the light. It was a short tough blade, well-balanced, with a wicked edge. Wolf laid a thumb against the steel. “It’s good metal,” he said respectfully.

“From Chuyo.” Chuyo steel was the finest in Ryoka. “Niall Cooley made the sheath.” Wolf ran his hand along the fine smooth leather. It was unadorned, with bronze rivets. Niall Cooley, from Chingura, was principal leather-worker for Dragon Keep. “There are odd folk in the hills sometimes. You may need it, when you go trapping.”

“Yes.”

“Thea is my niece,” Ono said. “When she was little, she came often to the house. She was a happy child. Rain thinks of her as a daughter.”

“As long as I live, no hurt will touch her,” said Wolf.

At the wedding, which was held in the little temple on the hillside, there was much laughter and drinking. Ono got drunk On Serret’s best red ale, and sang a song. The priestess Sirany said the words and lit the incense in front of the smoke-blackened statue of the Maker Goddess, Tukalina. Wolf and Thea drank thrice from the bowl, and Serret cried, from joy, mostly. After an appropriate time, Wolf and Thea slid from the building and were ceremoniously pursued by the young men, laughing and carrying torches. But Thea and Wolf had a head start, and Nevis, Thea’s brother, and Dai, Gerain’s youngest son, got into a less-than-ceremonious tussle, and Dai twisted an ankle in the tricky moonlight and had to be carried to the inn. So the lovers climbed the hill path in the moonlight, and had anyone been there to see—but no one was—they would have seen a marvel, as Thea Serretsdatter Dahranni crossed the mountain meadow to her new home with one hand triumphantly gripping the silver-tipped fur of a lean black wolf.