Her look of pleasure was so fleeting, I barely caught the roundness of her silver eyes, the easing of her jaw before it vanished again. I wanted to remember the look. It was so rare.
“And the prince is in a box,” she noted.
I cringed at her rough description. Dragons burn their dead and do not understand human burial. “A glass coffin the fey folk and the dragonlord made for him. Now he is laid to rest in a stone sarcophagus in the Pendragon family tomb.” I jerked my head toward the stone tomb down the hill, large as a church with its round stained-glass window over the thick double doors.
“Very English,” she hissed. “I do not understand the dragonlord’s help in this,” she added.
“He . . .” I paused, wanting to describe Lord Kahlil, the elder dragon who had greeted me in Euit my first night on Dragon’s Keep, who’d whisked Lady Tess and Kip from the tower. I knew he had helped make the glass coffin to appease King Arden’s wrath so he wouldn’t turn on Babak and blame him for his son’s death. “He did it to protect his own.”
“And what have you done to protect your own?” Vazan asked.
“What?”
Vazan’s narrowed eyes were thin as a line of light seeping under a door. “How is your work with the queen? Is her belly rounding yet? Will she keep her promise to us and remove the soldiers from our lands if she has her child?”
“I believe she means to keep her promise, but—”
“Yessss?”
“I don’t know what she remembers anymore, Vazan. Her mind is worse now she’s lost her son.”
Vazan licked her extended talons until they shone black as polished boots, then she looked up again. “Concentrate on the king and get close to him.”
“What do you mean by . . . close?” I asked, offended.
“I do not mean for you to spoil your virtue, Uma.” She flicked out her forked tongue. “You are the Adan’s daughter.”
“Then what do you mean, Vazan?”
She clicked a talon on my handmade driftwood headstone. “You tell me the mad queen is worse. It is the king’s army who keeps your people captive. If King Arden suffers any pain, use your skills to heal him. Earn his respect, remembering he is the one who holds the power.”
Vazan’s wits were as sharp as her teeth. “It is good counsel you give me, rivule.”
She had grown too thin these last few months. The scales stretched tightly over her chest made her breastbone stand out like a ship’s keel. “How long since you have eaten, Vazan?”
She held up five talons. Her last kill must have been small. A larger beast would hold her for a week, even two, but she didn’t like the taste of the game she caught on Morgesh Mountain. “You could try hunting in Dragonswood.”
“I am a free red,” she huffed. “I will not fly over that prison.”
“It is not a prison. It is a sanctuary.”
“I will never land inside those wallssss!”
I cleared my throat and adjusted the heavy herb basket under my cloak. “I need your help, Vazan.”
“Who do you need killed?” she asked, lowering her head with renewed interest.
“No one killed, rivule. I wouldn’t ask you to break the dragon treaty.”
“No red has killed or eaten men since the treaty was signed and Dragonswood walled in, but there are wayssss to do things secretly if you need them done, Uma. Bodies can be hidden.”
“No one killed,” I said again. “Something found. The plant called bapeeta. The one you brought back with the Adan to cure the queen’s wind mind.” I was completely out.
Vazan fixed her eyes on a flock of geese, easy treats for her to catch midair, if small. She was bored with the way the conversation was going and did not like being out in the drizzle. I would have to hurry before I lost her to the sky.
“The Adan drew the plant in his Herbal.”
“I am no herbalist. That is man’s business.”
“And woman’s,” I corrected, pulling Father’s book from my basket. I did not open it yet, fearing the ink would run in the soft rain. Vazan unfurled a wing, sheltering me so I could show her the page.
She huffed smoke as she peered down at Father’s drawing; her gray breath ghosted over me as I held up the book.
“Do you remember where you took the Adan for this herb? Can you fly me there, Vazan?” I tried to sound calm as I asked her. Just saying the word fly sent tingling sensations across my tongue and sharpened my desire.
“You wish to pluck thissss?” she said, pointing to the ink drawing with her smallest talon.
“Yes, as much as we can as soon as we can. Everything depends upon my curing the queen.”
“Giving her an offspring, not curing her wind mind.”
“Both, Vazan. The king cannot go to his wife’s bedchamber when she is raving.”
“Humans,” she said. “You fear emotions as if they had claws and teeth.”
“Nevertheless.”
She tipped her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “It is the king’s duty more than ever to get an heir on her now his son is dead.” She shut Father’s Herbal, pinching it between two talons. Then she withdrew her wing and gave a low growl. Ears flattened against her scaly head, she lifted her snout, sniffed the air, and took off, letting out a screech like a thousand angry cats.
Chapter Twenty-five
Graveyard, Wilde Island
Wolf Moon
September 1210
JACKRUN STEPPED OUT of the copse down the hill. Vazan must have scented him. So that was why she’d taken off, screeching. He climbed toward me in his fighting gear, a short sword strapped to his side.
I tucked Father’s book deep in my herbing basket and shouldered it again.
Jackrun looked around, making sure we were alone before he glanced skyward. It had stopped drizzling. “A beautiful red,” he said. “Desmond mentioned your father’s red dragon. I’ve never seen that breed before. I wish she’d stayed.” He hooked his thumb in his belt still looking up. “Desmond claimed he rode her once,” he added.
“No one but my father has ever flown with her,” I said. “Vazan is a free red.”
“Vazan.” He tasted the name and toed the grass with his boot. “I was pretty sure Desmond lied about it. And the other dragon, the one he mentioned?”
“We just buried your cousin. Why does any of that matter now, Jackrun?”
“It matters, Uma. He told us he’d ridden dragons often before he tried to jump. If that’s not true, I want to know.”
“Desmond didn’t lie about riding the other dragon, the one called Sorgyn that used to live near the king’s stables.” He’d seemed to care for the beast, bringing him prized meat slices from the kitchen.
“Where did Sorgyn go? No sign of any dragons near the stables now.”
I pointed toward the dragon-sized mound by the yew.
“They . . . buried him?” He shuddered. “That’s not right. Dragons burn their dead.”
“Sorgyn didn’t live as other dragons do. He lazed about and ate kitchen scraps. Vazan would have nothing to do with him when he died. She called him a winged pig. She refused to waste her fire on him to give him proper dragon rites.”
“I don’t blame her.” Jackrun hurled a stone at the bushes. Starlings burst upward in a black shawl and flew toward the distant orchard on the grounds above Pendragon Castle.
Jackrun turned and read the name I’d carved on the driftwood headstone. “Estruva Quarteney. Adan—Healer. So Adan means ‘healer’?”
I nodded, my head feeling too heavy for my neck.
“What happened to your father? How did he . . .” Jackrun cleared his throat. “Did Desmond do something, I mean did he . . . ?”
“Kill him?” I said. “No.” I looked down, remembering the moment I found Father’s body. A distant raven’s caw broke the silenc
e that had stretched out between us.
“I know my cousin’s death has made your task that much harder,” Jackrun said. “Her Majesty wanted a child, now she relies on you to help her have an heir. You had good reason to keep Desmond alive.”
“I also had reason to want him dead. I was his dog to kick around at court. In private he liked to watch me being whipped. And . . . other things.”
Jackrun clenched his fist. “The bastard. He never . . . overpowered you? He didn’t—”
I shook my head. “I managed to fight him off. The one time he nearly . . . you crashed through the window and knocked him flat.”
“I was glad to do it. The best cut arm and split lip I’ve ever had.” He licked his lip, dropped his brows. “If you had told me why you needed the key—”
“How could I? A girl does not speak of such things.” Neither in my village nor in the English court. “And we had only just met. I hardly knew you.”
“You know me better now,” he said.
I looked at him, wondering how much I really knew.
He was studying the name again. “Your father must have been proud of you,” he said. “Are there many female healers where you come from?”
His question was too close to the wound of truth. “My father wanted a son to train up as was our custom.”
“But he didn’t follow custom himself.”
“What?”
“Well, is it customary for an Euit healer to marry an English woman?”
I shook my head, gripped the folds of my blue velvet skirts. The gown was far more costly than my mother could have ever afforded growing up as an ironmonger’s daughter. Jackrun was staring.
“I’m guessing your mother’s a redhead.”
“How do you know?”
“Sometimes the torches or the sun catches red highlights in your black hair.”
I knelt, hoping my dark skin would guise my blush as I pulled weeds from the edge of the grave.
There was so much Jackrun didn’t know about me. From the beginning he’d assumed I had chosen to serve as the queen’s personal physician. That it was an honor I had wanted, perhaps even fought for. I’d let him think that, liking the respect it lent me. But I shouldn’t let him believe any of those lies here at my father’s grave. Here, if anywhere, I should tell the truth. “Father and I were abducted and brought here against our will, Jackrun.”
“What?”
I pulled more weeds. He fell on his knees across the grave from me, yanking up weeds there and tossing them to my growing pile. “Tell me,” he said.
“The queen heard about my father’s fertility cure and wanted it, wanted him to treat her. She did not invite him to come north. She sent her husband’s army down to capture him. She left an army there to hold the tribe captive until he succeeded. After he died—” My hand froze in a stranglehold around the weed stems. “After that, she kept me in her service. My father’s tonics work better than those of her other physicians. They calm her moods, ease her stomach—the powder takes away her pain. She knows the Adan’s medicines are powerful. She’s willing to wait a little longer for his miracle cure to work. She won’t let me go home until she is with child.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
I wanted to put my face against the earth. “I wasn’t ready yet.”
Jackrun started digging too, not just pulling. “She sent an army down,” he said, fishing for more.
I told him about the day the king’s army rode into our village. I dug deeper, more savagely, avoiding his eyes as I detailed the terrors, Prince Desmond slashing an elder’s throat, the soldier killing my uncle in front of my father and me, our miserable trip north in the jail cart.
Jackrun’s breath grew louder as he listened. Smoke trickled from his nose. Before I was done, he turned aside, a retching sound lengthening to a roar. The fire that poured from his mouth was silver orange as molten metal. Damp as the weed pile was from the morning drizzle, the weeds hissed and caught fire.
We did not speak for a long while. The crackling sounds of his fire filled my ears, the heat warming me. I could not burn away the ugly memories I’d just revealed to him, but his angry fire helped heal the ache.
“Sorry,” he said, nodding at the fire.
“Don’t be sorry. I wanted it. I needed it. It . . . helps.”
He shook his head half in disbelief. “Do you mean that?”
“I do.”
We watched the blaze blowing sideways now in the breeze. “You sound like my aunt Augusta. She didn’t mind my fire either.”
I thought of Lady Tess’s painting of the girl and boy on the beach. “Where did she go?”
He shook his head. “She never told us where. Just somewhere far from us.” He threw a hard glance toward the castle. “When you have so much dragon in you, it’s almost impossible to live walled in with other people.”
He’s speaking about himself, I thought, wiping my hands on the damp grass.
Jackrun stomped out the flames and dumped the remains of the burned weeds behind the nearby bushes. Returned and took my arm to help me up. His hand clasped the blue velvet a moment longer, feeling the blade strapped under my sleeve. “Good,” he said before letting go.
“Do you mean the gown or the knife?”
“Both.”
I smoothed my soft skirts. I’d told Vazan the gown was fighting gear. But just now I was glad I wasn’t dressed as mi tupelli, or in scribe’s clothing. Some part of me liked how the dress pleased him.
“So raw,” Jackrun said, looking at my red fingertips where I’d chewed the nails down to the quick. “You are worried,” he added.
I was always worried, but less so when he was near me. I couldn’t tell him that.
Jackrun said, “Uma, I have to go. They’re expecting me in the weapons yard. I’ve stayed too long already. Don’t head back right away,” he added. “It’s better if we are not seen together.”
“Why?” I asked, hurt. “You said that once before when we were on the ship and didn’t tell me why.”
“Uma, just . . . Will you meet me this time tomorrow?” He pointed downhill to the grove he’d emerged from earlier. “In the trees. We can talk then. Maybe then I can, we can . . .” He did not seem able to finish. He left me with dirt on my hands, questions in my mouth, a dull aching behind my eyes. He was gone before I could argue more.
Chapter Twenty-six
Elm Grove, Wilde Island
Wolf Moon
September 1210
THE NEXT DAY, I found Jackrun in the elm grove. The sentries on the outer curtain wall could not see us through the foliage. This is why he wanted to meet here, I thought as he saw me approach. The air was heavy with the threat of storm, but for once it wasn’t raining.
“Uma?” he said. A greeting and a question both.
“Jackrun.” I drew back my hood, the chill September air nipping my cheeks. I was late to meet him, too busy with the queen to get away until the last moment. I feared I’d miss him, but he waited. He was dressed in fighting gear, sword and all.
“What do you remember about the day Desmond fell?” he asked.
“I don’t like thinking about that day.”
“Do you think it was an accident?”
“Yes, of course. What else could it have been?”
“Murder.”
“Murder? It’s not possible. We saw it happen in front of us. No one pushed him off or—”
“A very clever murder,” he said again.
“No.” I stepped back and leaned against an elm trunk for support, pressing my hands against the coarse, ridged bark.
“Tell me you didn’t feel something wrong about that day,” Jackrun said, his eyes boring into me. “Tell me what made you come to Faul’s Leap in the first place.”
“I . . . It was the last day
of Egret Moon. A treacherous time some elders call the Murderous Moon. I knew you were all going to Faul’s Leap. I sensed something might happen there.”
He nodded. “Something like murder.”
“Not murder, not especially murder, just . . . something bad. Some mishap. What happened was an accident,” I said again more firmly. “Prince Desmond stood at the edge, Jackrun. He insisted on trying the leap. You tried to warn him. Even Sir Geoffrey stepped out to try and stop him.”
“But do you remember what he said?” Jackrun asked.
I closed my eyes a moment. “I think so.”
“I remember all of it,” Jackrun said, “because it concerned me at the time and I’ve thought about it ever since. He said, You should not take such a risk. You do not have the skills or training to do it.”
Jackrun leaned against a tree across from me, bent his knee, and rested the sole of his boot on the trunk. “If anyone said that to me, I would have jumped to prove him wrong. I think he said it so Desmond would defy him, and jump.”
“Why?”
“I think Sir Geoffrey wanted him dead.” Jackrun crossed his arms. “I have an idea why.” He frowned. “But I’m hoping it has more to do with the way Prince Desmond threatened Sir Geoffrey the day he broke up our fight. When he turned on him and said, Breathe a word of this, and I’ll let what I know about you slip, and you’ll be hanged for your own filthy sins. You remember how he said that and how Sir Geoffrey blushed crimson?”
“Would that be reason enough to kill Desmond?”
“If what he knew was vile enough to get Sir Geoffrey hanged, I’d say so.”
I thought of the spit boy they’d hanged for murder before we left for Dragon’s Keep. “There was a murder here at Pendragon Castle before we left.”
“What? Who was killed?”
“A lute player. His throat was slit. An innocent boy hanged for the crime.”
“How do you know the boy was innocent?”