The Gold Falcon

  As she was leaving the women’s hall, it occurred to her to wonder just how she could have been so calm around Arzosah. And why had she known the dragon’s name? For a moment she felt dizzy, and rather than slip and fall, she paused halfway down the stairs to the great hall until her head cleared. I wish Dalla and Salamander were here, she thought. But most of all, she wished she could run to Neb and feel his arms around her, a solid comfort in a world that had turned alien and grim.

  Arzosah returned to the army late on the following day with the message pouch around her neck and another white cow from the temple of Bel clutched in her claws. Dallandra was explaining the properties of her healing herbs to Neb when they saw the dragon flapping slowly along, weighed down by her dead prey as she headed for a nearby field.

  “I can tell you more about comfrey root later,” Dallandra said. “Let’s go fetch those messages.”

  Salamander joined them as they made their way through the crowded Westfolk camp and left it for the meadows beyond. Arzosah had found a nesting place a safe distance away from the army’s horses. A clump of big granite boulders rose from uneven ground like the knuckles of a fist pushing through a leather glove. Water trickled from a spring in their midst to a flat and sunny pasture where the dragon could warm herself. When Dallandra and the two men arrived, Arzosah was lounging on the grass and considering a pit beside the cool water of the stream. The dirt crusting her claws made it clear that she’d dug it herself. Apparently, the dead cow lay in the pit on its back because all Dallandra could see was its legs, pitifully akimbo.

  “I prefer to eat at night,” Arzosah remarked, “and the stream will keep it fresh. It’s quite hot up in the rocks.”

  “A good idea, truly,” Salamander said. “Uh, what’s that smell? Do you have another cow decaying somewhere?”

  “I don’t. I’ve been licking the hides clean and saving them for our scribe here. They won’t make the best parchment, but I’ll wager you can write on them once they’re tanned or treated or whatever your people do to them.”

  “I certainly can,” Neb said. “My humble thanks! I truly do appreciate it.”

  “We’ll bring a servant down to fetch them later,” Salamander put in. “I’m surprised you know about such things, O, pinnacle of dragonhood.”

  “I’ve seen books and the like before,” Arzosah said. “I am not some sort of savage.” She swung her head around to speak to Dallandra. “I assume you’ve come for the messages. Or the answers to them, I should say.”

  “We have indeed,” Dallandra said. “Ebañy, if you’ll just unbuckle that strap?”

  Arzosah lifted her chin to allow Salamander to relieve her of the message pouch.

  “By the by, young Neb,” Arzosah said, “I met your betrothed, and I was quite impressed.”

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Neb broke into a grin.

  Arzosah rumbled with laughter. “Beautiful? Why would I care about that? She’s fearless, is what I meant. There’s a letter from her for you in that pouch.”

  Neb turned to Salamander and made a move toward the pouch that was more like a snake striking than a gesture of “give it to me.” Salamander laughed and tossed him the leather sack.

  “Find yours,” Salamander said, “and then take the rest to the gwerbret.”

  “I will,” Neb said. “My apologies for grabbing.”

  With the pouch cradled in his arms, Neb trotted back to the camp. Arzosah watched him go, then turned to Dallandra.

  “Now that he’s out of earshot,” Arzosah said in Elvish, “I have a bone to pick with you, Dalla, and it’s not inside that cow. It’s mean of you to go around telling everyone my true name.”

  “What?” Dalla said. “I did no such thing!”

  “Then how did Branna learn it?”

  “She knew it?” Dallandra paused, thinking. “Ye gods! She must have remembered it, probably in one of her dweomer-dreams.”

  “She knew me in her last life?”

  “Jill didn’t truly know you, but she’s the one who deciphered your name in the first place.”

  Arzosah gently laid her head upon the ground between her paws. “Another poor dragon felled by the blows of wyrd,” Arzosah said. “I should have just thrown myself into a fire mountain and been done with it long years ago.”

  “Oh, by the Dark Sun herself!” Dallandra said. “What’s so wrong?”

  “To think that a dragon should be brought so low by the machinations of a lump of ectoplasm, a bit of etheric ooze, a gobbet of astral slime! That wretched Evandar, in other words. Curse him for writing my true name on rings, letting it fall into the hands of dweomermasters! It’s the indignity of it all that hurts.”

  Dallandra set her hands on her hips and considered Arzosah for a long moment. “It’s truly hard to feel pity for you,” she said at last, “when you’re larger than a banadar’s tent.”

  Arzosah snarled, but she did lift her head and cross her paws in front of her chest.

  “That’s better,” Dallandra said. “And speaking of the rose ring, it truly is time we had our little chat about Rori. What’s happened? Something evil has, hasn’t it?”

  Arzosah groaned. “I suppose if I don’t tell you,” she said at last, “you’ll only command me with my true name.”

  “I was thinking of that, truly, but I’d rather spare you the humiliation.”

  “Oh very well! There is one thing dragons hate above all else, and that’s admitting we were wrong. We’re so rarely wrong, of course, that we don’t have much practice at it. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much.”

  “Perhaps,” Dalla said. “Wrong about what?”

  “I should have listened to you, there in Cerr Cawnen. You were right. I should have let Rhodry die and then gone off alone to mourn him. And—oh, yes—since I’m abasing myself, allow me to apologize for threatening to destroy the entire town. I was out of my mind with grief.”

  “I know you were. I was furious with you at the time, but I’d never hold it against you.”

  “My thanks, then. After he worked the transformation, I was almost ready to forgive Evandar. With Rori mine, I was no longer alone. Everything seemed splendid—for a while. But then, well, everything changed. Oh, bitter, bitter wyrd!”

  “Would you please stop wallowing in self-pity and just tell us what happened?”

  “Humph! You’re certainly rude enough for two, but then, the dweomer seems to take people that way. Oh, very well! Rori went mad. It was the wound, you see. It’s never healed.”

  “You can’t mean the one that Raena gave him.”

  “Yes, I can. Just that.”

  “How—it shouldn’t—it’s been fifty years!”

  “I know that, but it’s never healed. It’s not much of a wound, a mere scratch to a dragon, just as we said at the time, but it drips and oozes and keeps him awake. He licks it and licks it until I screech at him to stop, but he can’t seem to just let it be. He goes about in a constant rage over it. Sometimes he just flies off, and I don’t see him for months on end. Then he’ll return, and all will be well for a little while, until that wretched, cursed wound drives him mad again.”

  Salamander grunted in disgust.

  “It’s a hard thing to hear,” Dallandra said. “Arzosah, Rori could come to me. I might be able to do something for that cut now. Before there just wasn’t enough time, since he was on the verge of bleeding to death and all.”

  “Oh, I suggested he find you years and years ago. He wouldn’t hear of it.” Arzosah paused, thinking. “He feels shamed, I suppose. He wouldn’t listen to you either, that day in Cerr Cawnen, but now he knows that you were right.”

  “I’d never gloat or suchlike.”

  “I know that. You know that. He refuses to see it. The wound’s never going to heal on its own, is it? It must have evil dweomer upon it.”

  “Not necessarily. The silver dagger punctured a lung, you see. That’s why he was dying from such a small cut.”

  “How horrible! But
it certainly doesn’t run that deep now. It’s probably because of the thickness of our skin.”

  “Yes, your scales must be quite solid.”

  “Indeed they are, and they’re attached to still another layer of skin.” Arzosah raised her head to expose her neck, a soft, pale gray-green. “You can see it under my chin, but it’s thin there. On our sides, it’s really quite substantial.”

  “That’s probably why the wound hasn’t killed him.” Dallandra paused, struck by an ugly thought. “You know, if we do manage to transform him back into human form and that wound tears the lung again, he’ll die. Oh, ye gods! I’m utterly perplexed by this.”

  “Don’t say that!” Arzosah’s voice rose high. “If you can’t find a cure, what hope does he have?”

  Dallandra merely sighed for an answer and glanced at Salamander, who’d gone pale.

  “I don’t know anything about physicking,” Salamander said. “I never studied it, not even when I was in Bardek. Nevyn might have been able to help, but I don’t suppose young Neb remembers medical lore.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing one does remember from life to life,” Dallandra said. “He’s got a good mind for learning it, though. The herbwoman in Trev Hael taught him about some common herbs in return for his writing out labels and such things for her, and now I’m teaching him more, but he’s still an apprentice. I wish Rori weren’t being so stubborn. Until I see him and get a look at the wound, I won’t know if I can help or not. It’s too bad I can’t summon him, but I don’t know his true name.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but maybe you do.” Arzosah said. “My guess is that it’s Rhodry tranDevaberiel. Or perhaps, Rhodry Aberwyn tranDevaberiel. I doubt if the Maelwaedd clan comes into it, but one never knows. I’d wager high on some combination of those names, I would.”

  “Oh, ye gods!” Dallandra felt like an utter fool. “I was thinking that he’d have a Dragonish true name now.”

  “No. Oh, no! You see, what I’ve come to realize is this: at root, in his soul and heart, he’s still that elven half-breed. He’s not a true dragon, Dalla, and he’ll never be one. And that’s the crux, the predicament, the quandary, as our prattling gerthddyn might say.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Salamander said. “I don’t prattle.”

  “You should beg it, and you do too prattle. But Dalla, now Rori’s driving me mad in turn. By all the holy flames of fire! If you could help, I’d—well, I don’t know what I’d do, but it would be something good.”

  “I’ll certainly do anything I can to help him, but I wonder. If he’s not a true dragon, will his name have the same power over him?”

  “Blasts of brimstone!” Arzosah thwacked her tail against the ground. “I hadn’t thought of that. It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “It’s worth a try nonetheless.”

  “And I thank you for that.” Arzosah hesitated, then clacked her jaws together several times. “I hope I’m not wrong about his true name. Having to admit I was wrong twice in a single day? I couldn’t bear it.”

  Arzosah was spared that further humiliation. In an ordinary tone of voice, Dallandra spoke aloud a number of possible combinations of the names: Rhodry tranDevaberiel, Rori tranDevaberiel, Rhodry Aberwyn tranDevaberiel, and the like. Eventually she came to “Rhodry tranDevaberiel o’r Aberwyn.” The moment she spoke it, she felt a little tremor of power, a slight burning in her mouth, and a delicate ripple of sensation around her lungs.

  “That might be it,” she said. “I’ll try the summoning, but let’s not get our hopes up too high.” She glanced at the sun, low in the west, and allowed her mind to shift its focus away from the material plane. “The astral tides of Air are still running at the full. I’ll wait till they’ve given way to Water.”

  Even though Branna’s letter was short and simple, Neb read it through three times. From her sloppy scrawl, so different from Solla’s precise hand, he could tell that she’d signed the letter herself. He kissed the signature several times, then rolled the letter up and put it into his saddlebags, where it would be handy when he wanted to read it again. While he waited for Dallandra to return, he wandered through the encampment until he found Tieryn Cadryc, who was pleased to learn that his wife and niece were faring well.

  “Next letter you write,” Cadryc said, “tell my lady that we’ve had no word from our daughter, but that I still have hope.” He paused, chewing on the edge of his mustache. “I’m afraid that bastard’s not going to let our Adranna go, but don’t tell her that, of course.”

  Yet it was the very next morning, when the cool dawn was brightening into a hot day, that Lord Honelg’s herald finally appeared again on his lord’s walls. He blew three notes on his horn and waved his staff, making the bright ribands dance in the pale light. The shout went round Ridvar’s camp to summon Indar.

  Neb—and everyone else in the Westfolk camp—hurried up the hill to join the gwerbret’s men, who had gathered some fifty yards from the entrance to the dun’s earthworks to wait during the parley. Speculations multiplied in whispers and murmurs, ranging from the extravagant hope that Honelg would surrender to the grim thought that he was merely going to order the princes and the gwerbret off his lands once again.

  In the event, the outcome fell between the two. When Indar returned, he sported a thin smile of satisfaction. He knelt before Ridvar, then spoke as loudly as he could to make his voice carry to all his anxious listeners.

  “Lord Honelg wants to send the womenfolk out, Your Grace,” Indar said. “He wishes to know if you’ll guarantee their safety.”

  “The gall of the man!” Ridvar snarled. “As if I’d do aught else! Besides, Lady Adranna’s father is here.”

  “Cursed right I am!” Cadryc shoved his way through the throng to join the gwerbret. “If anyone tries to harm my daughter or any of her women, then he’ll have me to answer to.”

  “And that should provide all the reassurance he needs,” Ridvar said.

  Indar rose, bowed to the noble-born, and trotted back to the dun, his staff held high, to disappear into the maze of earthworks. While this second parley continued, Ridvar and Cadryc’s men hurriedly armed, just in case Honelg was trying to work a ruse. In the past, a few dishonorable lords had used a call for parley to mount a surprise sally once the gates were open.

  “Let’s move closer,” Salamander said to Neb. “I want to be right at hand when the lady comes out.”

  “I take it you think we’ll be safe.”

  “I do. I truly can’t see a devotee of Alshandra risking his women to trick an enemy.”

  With some fancy maneuvering and a bevy of apologies, Salamander and Neb managed to work their way forward till they could stand beside Gerran, who had put on his mail shirt, though he carried his pot helm tucked under his left arm. He acknowledged the pair with a nod, then went back to watching the dun.

  Both heralds’ horns rang out. Indar walked out of the maze, and right behind him came a woman who looked so much like Galla that Neb knew it had to be Adranna. She was leading a little girl along by the hand, and right behind her came three women wearing the stained and faded dresses that marked them as servants. The servants carried bundles wrapped in blankets, the lady’s possessions, no doubt, as well as the few things they themselves owned.

  “The lass is Treniffa,” Salamander whispered to Neb. “I don’t know the servants’ names. My heart’s beginning to be troubled, though, because I don’t see Lady Varigga, Honelg’s mother.”

  Tieryn Cadryc started forward to go meet them, but Ridvar caught his sleeve.

  “You’d better stay back,” Ridvar said, “in case one of those archers decides you’re too valuable a target to ignore. They’re commoners, after all. We can’t expect them to behave honorably.”

  “True spoken, Your Grace.” Cadryc stayed among his men.

  Adranna hesitated at the sight of the army, then continued on, walking at a measured pace with her head held high across that last stretch of uneven ground. The servants trailed miserably a
fter, and little Treniffa looked frankly terrified.

  “Still no sign of Varigga,” Salamander said. “I fear the worst. The gates are closing now.”

  “How can you tell?” Neb said. “I can’t see a cursed thing from here.”

  Salamander gave him a weary smile, and Neb suddenly realized that the gerthddyn had just scryed out the dun. Adranna hesitated again, looking over the waiting men, then came straight for Salamander.

  “You!” Adranna stopped in front of him and considered him for a long moment. “Raldd told us of your treachery. You—after we fed you at our table.”

  “It aches my heart,” Salamander began, “but—”

  Adranna spat full into his face. With a toss of her head she walked past him, head held high. Neb pulled an ink-stained rag out of his pocket and handed it to Salamander, who took it with a murmur of thanks.

  Tieryn Cadryc was hurrying forward to meet Adranna when Treniffa spotted him. With a howl of “Gran, Gran!” she broke away from her mother’s grasp and ran weeping to his outspread arms. At the sight Adranna began to weep as well. For a moment she stood trembling and alone, watching her father as if she feared a blow.

  “Addi!” Cadryc bellowed. “Thanks be to every god! Er, or every goddess, I suppose I should say, eh? Your mother’s been worried half out of her mind, and I don’t mind admitting that I’m cursed glad to see you out of that dun.”

  “I—” Adranna was weeping too hard to finish. She ran the last few yards with the servants hurrying after. The Red Wolf warband closed around them all and swept them downhill to safety.

  After a brief discussion with his daughter and his captain, Cadryc decided to send the women back to Cengarn immediately. Gerran picked out five men for an escort and gave them their orders—get the women to safety, then return to the army. Two of those he picked, Warryc and Daumyr, decided to argue about it.

  “Your Grace, and you, too, Captain,” Warryc said, “we respectfully request that you let us stay with the army and send someone else to Cengarn instead.”