Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir (6 page)

I waited for her question, but it never came. She stated the accusations plainly, not caring to be tactful, and all things considered, I should've leapt at the chance to speak. I'd never been given an opportunity to explain myself, and all my arguments went unspoken, festering in my mind for the deaf ears they would've fallen upon. But when it came down to it, though there was nothing cruel in Sir Ightham's voice, nothing beyond neutrality, I wasted more than a minute biting the inside of my cheek.

“I realised I could heal people,” I eventually murmured, eyes fixed on Charley, “So I did.”

“But healing and necromancy are two distinct arts,” Sir Ightham returned. “One purifies, one pushes back death.”

“So?” I asked, shrugging. I was the only necromancer anyone seemed to have met, and if I didn't see the point in making a distinction between one sort of healing and another, I didn't understand why anyone else thought they had the right to make that judgement. “I stopped people from dying, from being ill, I fixed their broken bones, their injuries—where's the difference?”

Sir Ightham looked at me, thoughtful. I had to remind myself to keep moving, to put one foot in front of the other; actually being able to
talk
about my necromancy was making my head spin, every ounce of sense in my body screaming at me to stop.

After a moment, Sir Ightham tilted her head to the side, humming in agreement.

I took it as a victory. I tried not to grin, lest Sir Ightham find some new way to rebuke me, and as we reached the horses, gathered up the courage to say, “... they imprison necromancers in Thule, don't they?”

I regretted the words the moment they skidded off my tongue, as though I was reminding Sir Ightham of a fact she'd forgotten, and was soon to find my wrists in irons. Sir Ightham turned towards the horses, patting both her own and Charley on the side of the neck as I placed the carrots on the ground, brushing imaginary dirt off my new clothes.

“It is a good thing we are neither in Thule nor heading towards Thule,” she said, fishing a carrot out of a bag and instantly winning Charley over. “Change.”

I did as she ordered, hurrying to get my dirt-stained shirt off, clutching it to my chest, my scars, as I fumbled into the new one. I didn't have the gall to tell Sir Ightham to turn around, but her back was already to me as she acquainted herself with my horse, taking the liberty of feeding him more bitterwillow along with the carrots. I tugged my new trousers on, certain that someone wandering out of Eaglestone would catch sight of me, and then put a boot on the wrong foot.

“Okay,” I breathed, nudging my old clothes with the tip of my new boot. I curled my toes inside, not used to wearing anything on my feet—especially not anything made of stiff leather.

Sir Ightham turned around in her own time, idly raking her fingers through her horse's mane. I straightened when she set her eyes on me, brightly asking, “How do I look?”

She lifted her brow, and I expected that to be all the reply she gave. I crouched down, scooping up my clothes, and set about hanging them off a low branch of a nearby tree, hoping someone in greater need of them than me might wander by.

“Not very much like a Knight at all,” she settled on, and I looked back at her, but it was too late. She was already climbing onto her horse's back, reins gripped tightly in her hands. “We've no more time to waste. Dragons aren't wont to wait around forever.”

It was easy to underestimate dragons.

Sir Ightham, while considerably taller than I was, was hardly a tower in and of herself, and she had taken down a handful of dragons on her own. The tales of them were exaggerated, like all reports Michael reiterated, and they could not be as large or strong or fast as anyone claimed. The business of disposing of them almost seemed orderly: Sir Ightham would track down the beast and proceed to slay it, while I stayed at a safe distance, tending to the horses.

It wasn't so easy to shake the fear of pane.

As though the prospect of the one from Eaglestone having given chase wasn't bad enough, an old woman on the back of a cart had a few words of warning for us.

“Careful, girls,” she'd said, cart creaking as a frail looking donkey pulled it towards Eaglestone, “Saw a couple of pane a few miles back.”

From that point on, there was a pane lurking behind every tree and rock, no matter how hard of a time it'd have hiding. It was bright out and I could finally take in my surroundings, but I was too busy trying to pick out horns and claws and blood-stained tusks to appreciate any of it in. Not that it mattered: Sir Ightham made a point of avoiding any and all settlements we could've passed through, and I was treated to field after field.

I tried to match her horse's pace, to have Charley run alongside her, but every time we caught up to them, she'd tug on the reins, pulling away from us. By the time late evening was upon us, we'd cut through a forest, and though the sun had yet to be lured to cinders by the horizon, there wasn't as much light as I would've liked. Shadows grew darker, longer, and tales of Queen Kouris rushed to the front of my mind.

Long-since executed though she was, everyone in Felheim knew that her ghost wandered the forests, severed head clutched in one enormous hand, searching for the eyes that had been gorged from it; searching for any eyes she could claw out. It was a story, I told myself. Just a story, though why the pane would've been any different in death than she was in life was unclear.

Charley was starting to get skittish by the time we reached a clearing and stopped for the night. We'd travelled for much of the day, only stopping to eat and drink, and Sir Ightham hadn't said a word to me since Eaglestone.

I saw to Charley, reassuring the both of us with a few forced, up-beat murmurs, then sat by the fire she'd built, shivering. I wrapped my arms around myself and Sir Ightham kept her eyes on what she was writing.

“Do you think we're really going to run into one?”

Without looking up, Sir Ightham said, “Run into what?”

“A pane,” I said, making gestures of concern with my hands she didn't catch. “That woman said she'd seen two, and there was one in Eaglestone. It could've come along this road...”

Sir Ightham put her quill down on the parchment and met my gaze, sighing to herself.

“They.”

“I'm sorry—?”

“They.
They
could've come along this road,” she said, eyes flickering down to the ink that had yet to dry. “He, she, they. Not it.”

“Right,” I decided to agree, brow furrowed, “But i—they could've, couldn't they?”

“Unlikely. Pane always travel alone, outside of their tribes,” she said. She didn't put any effort into reassuring me; it was simply a side-effect. “I highly doubt the woman saw one pane, let alone two.”

“You're saying she was lying?”

I dropped my gaze when Sir Ightham did nothing beyond stare at me without blinking, and saw that she'd set out a portion of food on a scrap of brown paper for me. I assumed it was mine, at any rate: there was a second, larger pile of food next to her, and she was idly tearing apart a piece of bread while I waited for my answer. I reached out, pulled the food into my lap, and set about pushing crumbling chunks of cheese into my mouth.

“I'm saying the woman didn't see what she thought she saw,” Sir Ightham eventually said. “And pay no heed to the pane you saw in Eaglestone. After all, you know what they say about pane.”

I knew
plenty
of things that plenty of people said about pane, but most of those involved tearing flesh from bone, and that was of no comfort to me. I raised my brow, eager for an answer, for Sir Ightham, as brief as she was, phrased things in a new way. I'd never heard of pane living in
tribes
before: in all the books Michael had read to me, they were said to live in herds, like wild animals. Like the dragons they lived amongst.

“They never attack without being provoked,” she said plainly. Looking back down at another letter, Sir Ightham murmured, “And even then...”

The scrawl of her quill against parchment said she was done humouring me, and I picked at my meal of bread and cheese, missing the morning's offering of pie, now that there was ample drink available. When it became evident that I really didn't have anything on me beyond my horse and my knife, Sir Ightham procured a second waterskin from one of her bags and allowed me to fill it from a nearby river.

Those bags of hers were the reason my back was aching. I rolled my shoulders, shoulder blades pushing together, wondering why she needed
four
bags, each weighing as much as I did. I didn't know what went into dragon-slaying, beyond heroics and courage and all the padding of a good story, but it seemed as though Sir Ightham had packed up the entirety of Thule. I wouldn't have been able to scrounge together as much from my house, unless I broke down my bed and the kitchen table.

And then, as though our previous conversation hadn't come to a close, I blurted out, “But Queen Kouris—”

Sir Ightham's head snapped up. She wasn't frowning – her expression had never been anything but even – but the fire made her eyes shine like steel in a forge.

“Queen Kouris? What are you—afraid of
ghosts
?” she asked, clicking her tongue. “Why should you concern yourself with what the pane may or may not do? You're a necromancer. Push it from your mind.”

Sir Ightham spoke the word easily, but I wasn't glad of it. She said it with the same overwhelming force that my village's silence had roared with; she used it to silence me, to belittle me. I tore the paper my food had been on between my hands, feeling heat rush to my face and throat, fumbling with the implication that being ripped to shreds shouldn't bother me.

“Look, just because I can heal doesn't mean that—” I began, voice already straining before she cut me off with a look.

“Go to sleep,” she said.

So I did.

I tried not to throw myself against the ground, already versed in not giving a reaction. I laid with my back to the fire, stubbornly kicking off my boots, scuffing the sides with the soles. All in all, she did little to sour my mood; there'd been a bitter taste in the back of my throat for months, and after a full night and day of travelling, simply clenching my jaw wasn't going to stop me from falling asleep.

I dreamt of nothing, but slept soundly enough to convince my waking mind that I was at home, in bed. It was dark when I awoke to the feel of something jabbing against my ribs, and the hard ground had yet to form beneath me. I blinked my eyes open, saw a figure looming above me, and started. I realised that it was Sir Ightham as I scrambled back, realised that I really
had
run away, and she didn't laugh.

“You slept for too long,” was all she said as she climbed atop her horse.

Dawn was making a commendable effort to get itself started, but the sky wasn't tinged with enough light to be considered particularly useful. I reached blindly for my boots, trying to pull them on and hop over to Charley all at once. The fire had been put out, charred wood and cinders thrown into the grove beyond, and I didn't feel as though I'd slept for more than five hours.

“Where to today?” I asked, once I'd climbed onto Charley's back and was confident that I was mostly awake. I didn't care where we were headed, so long as it wasn't
into the maw of a dragon.
Yesterday had introduced Eaglestone, and I couldn't shake the feeling that today would have greater things in store.

“Praxis,” Sir Ightham said.

“
Praxis
?” Even I knew where Praxis was. It teetered along the very edge of Felheim, acting as a centre of trade and a gate in and out of Kastelir. “What's in Praxis?”

“Plenty of things.”

“What's in Praxis that
we
care about?”

We
might've been too strong a word to use. Sir Ightham gave her horse's reins a sharp tug, and I followed them through the thicket of trees.

“I need somewhere to store my belongings,” she eventually said. She didn't need to tell me that; my back was already protesting over the bags I was lumbered with. “And I am expecting a raven from a contact.”

“Who? Someone helping with the dragon?”

“Someone helping with the dragon,” Sir Ightham repeated flatly, coming to an abrupt halt. I stopped as she did, wondering what I'd done wrong that time, and saw her brow furrow in concern. I heard what she did, the sound of feet against brittle twigs, and she hissed, “Say nothing,” at me.

Light broke through the trees, matched by a cheerful whistling. My first instinct was to run and I didn't know why. We were far from the only travellers making our way through the woods. Sir Ightham stood her ground, for having our horses set off at a sprint would only draw more attention to us.

“Well, well,” a man said, imbued with confidence by the four companions behind him. “Up early, aren't you?”

My hands tightened around the reins, leather biting into my palms.

Bandits
.

I'd been so frightened of imaginary pane that I hadn't stopped to consider the possibility of running into bandits in the woods. All of them were dressed in clothes I suspected weren't as fine as they appeared at first glance, and they made a point of letting us know that they had weapons. The man who'd spoken, their self-proclaimed leader, drummed his fingers against the pommel of the sword resting against his hip.

“Good morning,” Sir Ightham said, words coming easily as two of the bandits behind the leader clumsily drew their swords. “Might I be of assistance?”

One of the women who'd drawn her blade snorted a laugh, and the man scowled without turning to her, thinking it no way to conduct business.

“That you can,” the leader said, “Heard there was a Knight around these parts, and I reckon a Knight would have a wealth of treasure on 'em, gold least of all. Don't suppose you've heard anything about that, have you?”

“I don't suppose I have,” Sir Ightham said, and sounded sorry to admit it. “But a Knight, is it? What do they look like? I should like to meet them.”

The bandit gave a dry laugh, not finding it funny at all, and those behind him slowly joined in the mockery. Sir Ightham dismounted her horse and passed the reins to me. I winced, as though the bandits hadn't noticed me until she'd made a point of interacting with me, and tried to calm Charley down. He knew something was wrong and kept clomping one hoof and then another against the ground, trying to pull away. I wrapped my arms around his neck, doing what I could to soothe him without taking my eyes off Sir Ightham and the bandits.