The Dragon Revenant

  Perryn avoided Arcodd’s two towns completely. About a hundred miles apart, they lay on a tributary of the Aver Bel that the locals called Aver Clyn, Moon River, but Perryn found a crossing about halfway between them, where the men of a farming village that was growing toward a small town had banded together to build a wooden bridge across a narrows. For a copper in toll they not only let him cross, but stood him a tankard in the local alehouse in return for a bit of news from Pyrdon. As he headed northeast and back toward wilderness, he realized with a sinking heart that he was a good third of the way home. In his mind he could already hear Benoic’s accusatory bellow.

  That evening he camped in a little dale where a glass-clear stream tumbled over rock and pooled under willow trees. He caught himself a pair of trout, stuffed them with wild mushrooms and wild thyme, then wrapped them in clean leaves to bake in the coals of his fire while he bathed, panting and blowing at the water’s cold. Once he was reasonably dry he pulled on shirt and brigga, dug his dinner out of the coals, and built up the fire again. Cursing at singed fingers he pulled open the charred leaves to release a cloud of wonderful steam and the smell of herbs. For the briefest of moments he was happy; then he remembered his uncle, and he groaned out a long sigh of despair.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The voice was soft and female, so close at hand that he yelped in sheer surprise. Not even his horse had heard her coming, it seemed, to nicker a warning. When he looked up he saw her standing among the willows, a lass of about sixteen, barefoot and dressed in a dirty brown smock torn off at the knees, with her waist-length tangle of bright red hair loose and flowing down her back. Although no one would ever have called her beautiful—her mouth was too generous, her nose too flat, and her hands too large and coarse for that—she had lovely green eyes, as wide and wild as a cat’s. For a long moment they contemplated each other; then her eyes strayed to the fish.

  “Ah, er, oh well,” Perryn said at last. “Are you hungry? There’s two of them.”

  Without a word she sat down, a wary distance from him at the fire, and accepted one of the trout on a plate of leaves. She ate neatly, delicately, flaking the tender flesh off the bones with thumb and forefinger and pausing every now and then to lick her fingertips with a pink and healthy tongue. By then the sun was going down, and the night wind had picked up cool, rustling the willow leaves and her long twists of hair, which was shiny clean in spite of the mess it was in. It occurred to him that he couldn’t just let her wander off into the cold night all by herself. If nothing else, there were bears in this part of the country, hungry, irritable bears just out of their winter dens.

  “Ah well,” Perryn said. “Do you live near here?”

  “I do. With my Da.”

  “And is he a farmer, then?”

  She shook her head no and began popping baked mushrooms into a greedy mouth.

  “Er, when you’ve finished that, we’d best take you back to him. Going to be cold tonight.”

  “Cold doesn’t bother me.”

  “Ah. Er, oh, well.”

  In the end, though, her father found them. They had finished the fish, and a chunk of bread apiece, and were sharing a cup of stream water, when Perryn heard men calling, a long long way away, and the barking of a dog. She went still, crouched like a rabbit in the bracken, then sighed with a melancholy of her own.

  “They would have to find me! I was just starting to have fun.”

  The calls came closer, sharp with worry and fear.

  “Caetha! Caetha, answer us! Caetha, where are you?”

  She sighed again, then stood up, tossing her arms over her head and stretching her back, shaking her head to tumble her long hair down in the firelight.

  “Over here, Da! Here I am!”

  In a few minutes three men and a black-and-tan hound came clumping and slipping down the dell. Two of the men, both about twenty, seemed to be a noble lord and one of his riders, because they both wore shirts embroidered with rowan leaves, but one had a pair of much-mended plaid brigga. The third, a slender man with coppery hair going heavily gray about the temples and a silvery red beard to match, was dressed in a long smock like Caetha’s, but his was clean, neatly hemmed, and worn over a pair of gray trousers. About his waist was a belt clasped with a buckle in the shape of a golden stag, and from a leather loop hung a small golden sickle. As they came into the firelight Caetha lazed over to him and smiled winsomely while he hugged her and the hound danced round in drooling joy.

  “You wretched little creature! You’ve done it again, and here you promised! Look at this—you’ve dragged Lord Norryc and poor Badger away from their fire again, and curse it all, Caetha, you promised you’d stop wandering off like this!”

  “Did I?” She frowned in concentration. “Oh, well, I suppose I did, truly. I’m sorry, Da. I’m sorry, Lord Norryc. But Badger looks glad of the run to me.”

  The hound wagged frantically, as if agreeing.

  “That’s not the point!” the father snarled.

  “I know, Da. Er, well, you see, I had to come out. There’s someone here I wanted to meet, and you should meet him, too.”

  Her father gave her a little shake, then let her go, turning and staring at Perryn as if he’d just noticed him standing there.

  “Er, ah, she was hungry. So I gave her some dinner. I was going to take her home, but she wouldn’t tell me who you were.”

  “No doubt, good sir. She’s a wild thing, truly, and more than a bit simple, as no doubt you’ve noticed.”

  “I hadn’t at that. Wild, truly, but er, well, she doesn’t seem simple to me.”

  All three men stared, no doubt bestowing the title on him as well.

  “Well, my name is Middyr, and as you’ve doubtless guessed, this is my daughter.” He turned to Caetha. “What do you mean, someone I should meet?”

  She looked down and began drawing a line in the dirt with one big toe.

  “I just knew it,” she said at last. “I felt he was here.”

  Middyr glanced Perryn’s way, found him equally bewildered, then shrugged the problem away. Apparently he was used to ignoring much of what his daughter told him.

  “You have my thanks, young man, and my blessing, too, for that matter. You see, I’m the priest of Kerun hereabouts.”

  Perryn made a little yelp of pure joy, like the chirp made by a hungry child when it sees honeycake coming out of an oven. He felt his eyes fill with tears.

  “Of Kerun, good sir? Truly, I thought his priesthood dead and gone. Er, no insult, but it’s gone where I come from.”

  “And in most of the kingdom, no doubt. I’m most likely the last of my kind, much as it aches my heart to say so. You seem much moved, good sir.”

  “I am, truly. I worship him, you see. I mean, he’s my god. The other ones aren’t. I don’t know why.”

  Middyr cocked his head to one side and considered him for a long moment with a certain strange hope dawning in his eyes. Lord Norryc coughed in a deferential sort of way.

  “Uh, Your Holiness? It’s getting a bit cold out here to stand around discussing theology.”

  “Well, so it is, and my apologies. We can all get on home now. You have my profound thanks, your lordship, for bringing your dog out.”

  “Oh, Badger always finds her quick enough.” He gave Perryn a smile. “She may be simple, but she has an amazing touch with animals. Why, I swear they understand what she says to them! Horses, too, not just dogs.”

  Perryn’s heart thudded once. While his lordship, his dog, and his man were all tromping off again, Caetha looked only at Perryn, her eyes as rich and lively a green as spring ferns on the forest floor. When he risked smiling at her, she smiled in return with a witch-warmth that wrapped his soul. His heart began pounding in earnest—could she truly be like him?

  “Well, good traveler,” Middyr said. “Can we offer you our hospitality? We have a little house not too far from here in the woods, right beside Kerun’s shrine. If naught else, no doubt you’d like to pray
at the altar of the god.”

  “I would. My thanks, Your Holiness. Let me just bury this fire and saddle my horse. I’d like naught better than to visit you tonight.”

  That night’s visit stretched to another, and a few more beyond that, then an eightnight or two more, as Perryn began, almost without thinking or asking, to help Middyr with the work of his holdings as well as the shrine. The local noble-born clan had given the priests of Kerun four large farms to support the temple as well as a large tract of wild forest around the shrine itself, but up in that sparse country the rents and dues from the properties wouldn’t have been enough to support the widowed priest, his daughter, and their two servants. Perryn helped Middyr tend his horses and pigs or worked with Caetha in the kitchen garden. Planting and tending living things was something she loved, and her knowledge of herbs and garden lore was so profound for a young lass that he rapidly realized that she was no village idiot or ordinary half-wit.

  She had her quirks, though. No one could persuade her to wear any sort of footwear, not shoe nor clog, unless the snow was so icy that an ordinary person’s feet would have frozen fast to it. As for her hair, she refused to have it cut, yet she also refused to comb it. At times she was given to fits of horrible temper, when she would throw sticks of firewood or iron pans around the kitchen, then rush outside to collapse weeping on the grass. She would let no one near her then, not even her father or the household cats, whom normally she treated like babies, cuddling them and feeding them with her fingers.

  At night, with the work done, Middyr would tell Perryn about Kerun’s lore, and his was no idle chatter or storytelling. He would discuss some point of the god’s tale, then question Perryn about what he’d heard, patiently correcting his more than willing pupil until Perryn had every detail perfectly memorized. At times they would tend the shrine itself, wiping clean the stone altar and oiling and polishing the wooden statue of the god until it gleamed. Although Middyr gave him scraps of temple lore, there he was cryptic, passing on only those details that an uninitiated man could hear.

  When the first crop of wheat was turning golden in the fields, Perryn realized that he was never going to want to leave. He was also certain, however, that he was about to wear out his welcome, simply because he always did wear out welcomes, even among his kin. One cool evening he and Middyr were sitting at the round table by the kitchen hearth, discussing how Kerun had been born in the wilderness and suckled by a doe for a foster mother. Nearby Caetha sat sorting dry beans with six cats round her feet—the ginger torn always liked to sleep with his head right on her feet, in fact—and frowning as she worked. Her hair was its usual thorn bush, clean and gleaming in the firelight, but tangled into thick fuzzy clots at the nape of her neck. At a break in the conversation Perryn mustered what was left of his sense of courtesy.

  “Er, ah, well,” he mumbled. “Somewhat I’ve been meaning to say, er, oh well. Um, I’ve been rather rude, imposing on you like this. Time I er, ah, got on the road again.”

  Caetha looked up with a howl that sent cats scattering.

  “Ah well, I can’t stay here forever,” Perryn said, feeling close to tears. “Eating your father’s food and all that.”

  She threw the bowl of beans across the room and jumped to her feet, howling again as she rushed out the door.

  “I get the distinct impression,” Middyr said, rubbing the side of his face with one calloused hand. “That she’d like you to stay. I’m afraid I’m the one who’s imposing on you, lad. Caetha’s my only daughter, you see, and I’ve never seen her as calm and happy as she’s been this last few weeks. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Forever, if you want.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly. Who will be priest when I die? You’re the only man I’ve ever met who cared one way or the other for Kerun’s rites.”

  “Oh.” Perryn considered for a moment. “Oh, er, ah, well. Thank you. I’d love to stay. Truly. Er, well, um.”

  He looked down to find indignant cats glaring at him.

  “I’d best see where Caetha went,” Perryn said, mumbling again. “Don’t want her running off.”

  Hugging his welcome he ran out the door into a night washed silver with a full moon. Although the farmyard was silent, the barn door flapped open, and he could guess where she was, because like him, she found the company of horses a comfort. In a pile of hay she was sprawled full-length and sobbing in the dark. When he sat down beside her, she looked up and hissed at him.

  “Er, I’m not going after all, you know.”

  The sobbing stopped while she considered.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  In the trickle of moonlight spilling in through a nearby window he could see her long tangle of hair, the palest silvery-red in this light, covering her like a matted blanket. He stroked it lightly; then, starting down near her waist, he picked out a particularly tangled bit and began teasing it out with his fingers. At first she went rigid, then slowly relaxed, as a bit at a time he worked his way up to the nape of her neck and got that one long lock of hair smooth and tangle-free. When he started on the one next to it, she moved a little closer to him, then closer still as he fell into the rhythm of the work. All at once he realized that there was a rhythm, that he was performing some sort of ritual, something half-remembered and half-known that seemed to come from the deepest levels of his soul. She stretched luxuriously and rubbed up against him as he worked, as if she too understood. Although his back began to ache, because it took hours to get that mane smooth, he never once considered stopping.

  At last he could comb her hair with his fingers without meeting anything nastier than a bit of straw. She sat up, smiling at him, stretching again, then putting her hands on his shoulders and kneading them like a cat. The warmth of that smile was so palpable that he felt as if they sat in noontide sunlight.

  “Er, well, we’d best get married, hadn’t we? First, I mean. Er, ah, your father is a priest and all that.”

  She jumped up, slapping him across the face, but she was giggling as she ran out the door. As he followed, he was wondering why he’d never noticed before how truly beautiful she was.

  Although in the village the folk snickered about how clever Middyr was, to find a husband for his half-wit daughter and a successor all in one lucky stroke, Perryn himself knew that Kerun had at last heard his prayers and brought him home.

  Three

  Up in northwestern Cantrae, on the banks of the Aver Can, is a small town called Brin Toraedic, which gets its name from a strange hill rising out of a meadow about two miles to the south. At the rocky crest of the grassy mound is a ravine, a deep cleft running as straight and smooth as if a giant had sliced it open with a sword. If you ride that way, the townsfolk will tell you that an evil demon once built himself a dun on the hill and waged war on the gods until Bel struck him down with a thunderbolt. The demon sank back down to the Third Hell through the cleft, which to this day will lead you down to the Otherlands—if you have the nerve to try the climb. But even with the demon long gone, strange things still happen on the tor, or so they say, blue lights dancing in the moonlight, half-seen shapes skittering around, and wails, creaks, and knockings in the night.

  In Jill and Nevyn’s time, the town was only a tiny farming village, some five miles from the tor. Since she’d always assumed that Nevyn would live among the common folk, she wasn’t surprised when he told her that he had a home there.

  “Or near the village, I should say,” Nevyn said. “You need privacy for our kind of work. You’ll see when we get there. Now, I haven’t visited my house in fifteen years, but I’ve sent the Wildfolk ahead to air it out, like. I wonder what kind of job they did?”

  They found out on the hot summer afternoon when they finally reached the tor. Under a glaring, windless sky it stood dusted with clover, looking like some grim old giant turned to stone with the ravine for a battle scar. As they approached, Jill could see Wildfolk clustering in
the cleft. So could her horse—it danced and pulled nervously at the bit until Nevyn soothed it with a few soft words.

  “We’ll have to walk the horses up,” he remarked. “It’s too steep a ride.”

  “Oh here! Is this where you live?”

  “I did until about fifteen years ago. I’ll admit to being pleased to see it again.”

  The cleft was about six feet wide, and one side was just a natural cliff of packed dirt and weeds. The other, however, was a proper stone wall, made of massive true-cut blocks, and sporting a wooden door with a big iron ring in the middle. The Wildfolk came to meet them, sylphs like a thickening in the air, gnomes with scrawny faces and long arms, dancing and clustering round Nevyn like children welcoming their father home. A blue sprite with a mouthful of pointed teeth materialized on Jill’s shoulder, then pulled her hair so hard that it stung. With a yelp, Jill swatted her away.

  “Stop that,” Nevyn said to the sprite. “Jill’s going to live here, too.”

  The sprite glowered, then vanished with a puff of air.

  “I put this door in myself,” Nevyn said. “A carpenter would laugh at the job I did, but it opens and shuts well enough.”

  As if in demonstration he swung the door wide and walked in, the horse and mule following him gingerly. When Jill led her horse after, she found a stable, a big stone room with four mangers along one wall and fresh hay piled up by the other. Somewhere nearby, she heard the sound of running water. On the wall was an iron sconce with a half-burned wooden torch. Although it took Nevyn two snaps of his fingers to light the old, damp wood, finally the smoke rose straight up and disappeared through a hidden vent. The air was remarkably clean and fresh for a cave.