Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir (2 page)

I almost forgot I was there to see a Knight. The sight of the tavern alone was incredible.

Whatever hazy quality my return brought with it was soon dispelled. I'd only seen the village gather in such force once before, and the sight made me tense. But they didn't see me, not at first. They were turned towards Marmalade Lodge, the only inn our village could boast of, unoccupied for the last five months. Still, the owners could hardly spare a thought for their past misfortunes, now that a Knight was staying with them.

Michael's shoulder bumped against mine. He kept close, and I pushed myself onto my tiptoes, as though it might help me see through the wall of the inn. While I was busy trying to catch a glimpse of a Knight-shaped blur at one of the windows, someone in the crowd happened to glance my way.

Not just
someone
; Thane, the head of the village elders. He caught my eye and I sunk flat on my feet, hoping I might sink further still. He didn't have to say a word. The villagers looked to him every so often, as if he had the power to summon the Knight out into the open, and they followed his gaze.

What should've been familiar faces were no longer how I remembered them; they despised me and it darkened their eyes. Made them all look the same, somehow.

Thane stepped towards us. Just enough to break from the crowd, for even he didn't dare come too close. Over his shoulder, I saw the apothecary’s. The door was boarded shut, and the windows had been covered. They feared some remnant of me would leak out.

The apothecary himself had never returned.

“Northwood,” Thane began, speaking to Michael and Michael alone. His voice was quiet, controlled. He would've resorted to shouting, had the Knight not been within earshot. “What are you doing, lad? Surely you of all people realise how important this is to us. Run her back to the farmhouse and nothing more'll be said on the matter.”

“She only wants to see the Knight. What's wrong with that?” Michael asked, as though he genuinely didn't know.

Thane pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath.

“Thirty years I've been elder here, and never have I—” He clenched his jaw. Behind him, a woman ushered one of the children I'd saved back into their house. “You know what they do to those sorts up in Thule. Now, we've been plenty lenient thus far, despite having no reason to be. Should a Knight find out about this it's going to be a different story indeed.”

Isolation wasn't the villagers' idea of justice, and it certainly wasn't Thane's. Anger had burnt in his eyes when he first found out what I was, embers of utter resentment, and I felt it more now than ever in the way he refused to look at me. He'd do worse than they did up in Thule, if only he knew how. If only he felt a sense of bravery as keenly as he did betrayal.

“Happily, this isn't Thule,” Michael pointed out.

“All the more reason why we have to stay in the Knight's favour. It's for the good of the village, lad.” How many times had Thane kept me bound to the apothecary's by telling me it was
for the good of the village
? “Go on. I'm only being generous because your father's a good man and so are you, and I know neither of you asked for this. Get her out of here before she ruins us again.”

I stepped forward. Thane didn't inch back, but the villagers behind him flinched. I wondered what would happen if I took another step, whether they'd scatter or surge towards me. Not daring to move any closer, I never found out.

“I still have a name, you know,” was all I managed to murmur, shoulders up by my ears as I turned, hands balled into fists.

“Rowan!” Michael called out after me. He grabbed my elbow, convinced he could make the villagers to see sense, but I kept on walking.

“It's alright,” I said, staring straight ahead. “I know you were telling the truth about the Knight—that's why I came down, remember?”

Even with the steep relief, I fled the village faster than Michael and I had charged towards it, legs and back aching, chest tight. Breath coming easily, despite that. No more than twenty minutes had ticked by, but I'd left the sheep alone for too long; I was almost too late.

The lambs bleated in confusion, distress, and the sheep circled them, trying to herd the flock to safety, just as startled themselves. A wolf had got in. Wolves
always
got in, no matter what we did to reinforce the fence. It crept in from the tangle of woodland beyond the farm and crouched low, ready to strike.

The journey back to the hill hadn't done anything to burn off the frustration coursing through me, and I was glad to see the wolf. I bolted towards it, ducking down to grab the crook I'd left rested against the tree stump, and it rose to its full height, considering its options.

The wolf chose not to flee and took its chances. It leapt at me but I'd fought off wolves before and it probably hadn't so much as seen a human up close. I swung out with all the force in my body, cracking the wolf around the side of its skull.

It yelped, knocked to the side but far from defeated. It made ready to strike again, but unfortunately for the wolf, I didn't care what it did to me. I didn't care, I didn't care,
I didn't care
. I struck it over and over, blindly lashing out until I could get my arms around its neck. I pulled a knife from my pocket, the one Michael had given me for my twentieth birthday, and folded it open in one hand. Bringing it to the wolf's throat, I drove it in as quickly as I could, as cleanly as I could.

The blade was in desperate need of a sharpening but it did the trick; the wolf stopped struggling.

At least someone was having a worse day than I was.

“Easy now, easy now,” I murmured to the trembling sheep, trying to coax them back out into the open. Didn't they know they were only making it easier for the wolves when they huddled together like that? “It's alright now—the wolf's not going to bother anyone anymore.”

In the end, the lambs were the bravest of all. They didn't know enough to cling to fear.

I spent the afternoon focused on finding the gap in the fence. I discovered it all too quickly and took my time repairing it with what I had around me; large rocks to block the hole the wolf had dug, dirt to cover it back up.

From there, I squinted down at the village and tried to imagine the colours it was draped in. In all likeliness, the worn decorations reserved for the Phoenix Festival had been brought out. I consoled myself with the knowledge that no matter how thrilled the villagers were by such a turn of events, at least they were forced to think of me. They'd be on edge, certain that I'd find some new way to ruin things for them.

The sun was showing signs of setting by the time Michael joined me. He walked, and I didn't run to meet him.

“Not the year for it, is it?” he said, spreading his hands out in front of me to emphasise what
it
was. “Fifteen hundred years since Kondo-Kana helped chase our ancestors out of the Bloodless Lands! They probably think you're her descendant, here to carry on her work.”

He said it lightly, deciding it was just absurd enough for the villagers to believe, but I only shrugged my shoulders. It didn't matter what year it was or how long it'd been; the villagers were always going to react as they did, blindly following Thane's lead.

“Anyway, sorry I took so long. I was trying to make them see sense, but they're as thick-headed as ever. And after that...”

“You wanted to see the Knight,” I said, and he nodded. He didn't seem particularly sorry to have left me alone for so long, but I said, “It's alright. I was curious too. What's she like?”

“She's—she's like a
Knight
. She's
exactly
like a Knight! Forget all those stories I wasted my breath on in the past. Even if you were to cobble them together, you wouldn't get an accurate impression of her. She's what I've been trying to write about all this time. Terrifying – terrifying to a dragon, but you feel echoes of it around her – and beyond powerful,” Michael said, and then paused, rubbing his chin. “Gorgeous, naturally.”

The concept of a Knight was still an odd one to me. Michael shared stories with me from the day I was born, and Knights always featured; but so did merfolk and goblins. I saw no reason for Knights to have a firmer place in reality than any of the rest. One person, set against a dragon and actually coming out victorious? It made no sense to me. Of course, I'd never seen a dragon before. For all I knew, people exaggerated their size in the same way Michael played up the Knight's virtues.

“What's her name?” I asked, as if that sliver of knowledge would help me to understand her role in the world.

“Sir Ightham,” Michael said, practically singing the words.

It meant nothing to me. The names of Knights were probably well known in the bigger cities, but being as far from Thule as we were, we rarely heard anything from the capital. Our newspapers were always a month out of date, ensuring we'd be the last to know when a new monarch came into power.

Still, it was nice to know. Sir Ightham. I thought of the creatures she'd faced to earn such a title. Whatever the truth was regarding dragons, I knew for a fact that they put up more of a fight than wolves did.

“I've got to get back to the hall—there's going to be a feast tonight, and I said I'd help out. To get back on everyone's good side, that sort of thing,” Michael said, making it sound like a momentous chore he reluctantly had to attend to. Making it sound as if he didn't want to spend as much time around the Knight, around Sir Ightham, as was possible. “You should get some rest, though. Make sure you have something to eat. Go back to the house and have someone else tend to the sheep.”

I held out a hand and let him help me to my feet. He was right about one thing: I was
exhausted
, body aching, stomach empty. A hot meal and a long sleep in my own bed wasn't going to do anything to fix the mess my life had become, but there was no point in denying myself the basic necessities.

Michael's gaze trailed over my shoulder, causing him to jump.

“Is that—” he asked, wide-eyed, and brought a hand to his forehead when he realised that the wolf was dead. “Don't do that to me, Rowan. Causing trouble, was it? Hah, reminds me of the time—”

“Don't,” I said firmly. Michael fell into a glum silence, lips sealed, and helped carry the wolf back to the farm. My strength faded along with the rush that had taken the wolf down and it was a bit of a pain to get over the fence, but we managed it between us. Michael left me and wolf on our doorstep and hurried back into the village, happy to forget all that had happened to me. In his defence, five months was a long time, and he couldn't be expected to be as miserable as I was forever.

I pushed the front door open, and called out, “Dad?”

He'd want to move the wolf, if not skin it before dinner.

“Out back!” came his reply from the side of the house.

I left the wolf where it was, not worried about it running off, and headed around to meet my father. He was out by the stables, dragging a pig towards a barn that was only ever used for one thing. Dragging our
biggest
pig.

I narrowed my gaze suspiciously, but said, “There's a Knight in the village, you know. But I'm sure Michael's told you already.”

“Your version's a lot easier to digest,” he said, pausing to smile at me as he tugged the rope around the pig's neck. “They had her horse brought up to the stables, actually. Beautiful creature. Tan as anything.”

I glanced towards the stables, then back to the pig.

“I bet the elders weren't happy about that—they really need to rebuild the inn's stables,” I said, arms wrapped around myself. They couldn't very well tell a Knight that there was nowhere to house her horse, I supposed. “What're you doing with that pig?”

It oinked indignantly at my question.

“The village is putting on a feast, and they want our prized pig,” my father said, and to his credit, didn't sound as put out about it as I would've.

“But it could feed us for
months
!” I protested. I knew what the villagers were bound to do. They'd drain our resources in one fell swoop, eager to convince Sir Ightham that they always lived so lavishly. That our village was worthy of the King and Queen's notice.

“Now, Rowan. Sir Ightham is our guest, and it's up to us to see to it that she has everything she needs,” my father told me. Infuriatingly, he only ever had kind words for anyone.

There was a feast held in her honour the night after that, too. In their defence, there was rather a lot of pig to get through. I watched it unfold from the hillside, surrounded by sleeping sheep.

I closed my eyes, strained my ears, and imagined that I could hear the merriment within the village hall. Everyone but me collectively shirked their responsibilities in favour of celebration, as if the Knight's arrival alone meant that we'd never face another famine again and had been granted immunity from the plague slowly creeping along the coast. I was sure the villagers believed that fortune hadn't deserted us along with our forgotten gods.

I'd always be on the outside, alone in the hills. Sir Ightham's arrival was a relief of sorts, but it served to highlight all that I was missing. All that I would continue to miss. It was unlikely that another Knight would ever grace our village again, but that didn't mean that opportunities for... for
fun
, to laugh and actually talk to people who weren't related to me – who weren't sheep – wouldn't present themselves again.

And as long as the village knew what I was, I'd be denied the chance to indulge in those things.

I said as much to Michael over breakfast the next morning, and he blithely shrugged.

“What are you going to do? Run away? Good luck with that—you don't have the faintest idea how the world works!”

I didn't. I'd never gone beyond the limits of our village; the elders made sure of that, a thousand years ago, when I was of use to them.

“I might go,” I said, eager to prove him wrong. “I could find work as... as a healer.”

“Back to lies again, is it? That's what caused this whole mess in the first place,” Michael chided. “It won't work because you don't
want
it to work. You want the people to know you're here; you want them to know that they're cut off from the world because of you. Say you leave—what happens then? One of the elders performs a ridiculous cleansing ritual, word spreads, and trade rolls back in. You've cost this village a lot, you know. Don't do the same to some other poor, unsuspecting settlement.”