The Dragon Charmer (38 page)

They are getting into the boat, pushing off from the bank. Sysselore poles with unexpected vigor, her thin arms moving like wires.

“You’ll have to run for it.” Kal grasps Fern by the elbow, pointing her to the farther limits of the cave where a faint leakage of light shows the mouth of a tunnel yawning in the distant wall. “That’s the way out. Just follow it up and up till you get where you want to be. Go now! I can’t hold her.”

“But you—”

“She won’t harm me: I am her son. Go!”

Fern takes a few steps, falters, spins at a cry. Kal is doubled over as if with a sudden cramp; in midstream, Morgus sways in the boat, words bubbling from her mouth, soft, ugly words, shaping pain. Even as Fern reaches him he falls, writhing. His body jerks and arches out of control; violent shudders batter him against the rock. “Run!” he gasps through a rictus of agony. “She can’t—reach
you. Run!”

But she pledged friendship, though not from the heart, manipulating him, seducing him to her will…

She says in a shaken voice: “I won’t leave you.”

She struggles to focus her mind, to locate the nucleus of
pain and fight it. The distraction is fatal. A moment slips away and Morgus is on her.

There is a hand around her throat: its boneless grip has the strength of an octopus. Her lungs tighten, the voice is squeezed from her mouth. As she looks into those luminous eyes she knows it will not be quick. Morgus wants to kill slowly, slowly, savoring every second, every tiny increase of torment, aroused to the verge of ecstasy, until her whole vast bulk is vibrating with pleasure and she is filled and sated and glutted with death. Her other hand caresses Fern’s face, fumbling for a nostril to rip open, an eyeball to pluck out. At her side, Sysselore clings like a leech, throbbing with shared rapture. And in a cold small corner of her brain Fern registers the weight of the head, bounced against her hip, and on the left side, forgotten throughout the journey, the contents of her pocket, pressed into her thigh. Morgus has left Fern’s arms free, enjoying her ineffectual scrabbling at that deadly grip. Fern reaches into the pocket, closes her fist tight on the fire crystals. Then she withdraws it, and thrusts it deep into the quagmire of the witch’s bosom. Fern’s voice is gone but her lips move and her mind speaks, her will speaks, and the buried hatred rises, transmuted into raw power.
“Fiumé! Cirrach fiumé!”
Her hand bursts into flame.

There is an instant of hideous anguish then Fern stumbles backward, suddenly released, and the pain is gone. In front of her, Morgus begins to scream. Her mouth opens into a gaping red pit, her teeth rattle like pebbles in the wind of her shrieks. Those tentacle fingers wrench at her clothing and tear her own skin, but the crystals cling, eating into her breast, and the dry garments blaze like tinder. Sysselore pulls back quickly, but not quick enough: she is engulfed in flame like a sapling in the path of a firestorm, bucking and twisting with the force of the conflagration. She seems to be trying to reach the river, but there is no time, no time at all. Paper skin and cotton-wool hair crumple into ash, and the charred sticks of her bones fold up and disintegrate, broken into fragments that scatter as they hit the rock. Morgus is still moving, a blackened formless mass crawling in a pool of molten fat toward the bank. Crisped flakes peel away from her, lumps that might be cloth or hide or flesh. She has no face left, no hands, only a blind
groping of fingerless stumps, the slow agonized heaving of what was once a body. Fern watches in a sort of petrified horror, wanting it over. Convulsions rack her that must surely end it, but somehow Morgus impels herself forward, covering the ground in millimeters, until at last she reaches the edge, and very gradually topples down into the water. The river swallows her, hissing. Icy steams rise into the air.

“Quickly!” Kal urges, on his feet beside her, his pain gone even as Morgus’s agony began. “Put your burned hand in.”

“But I can’t feel anything—”

“You will, if you don’t treat it now. This is the Styx: it may heal you. But don’t leave it there more than a second or two—”

She needs no such admonition. The cold sears; a moment longer, and it might have taken her hand off at the wrist. As she withdraws she looks for Morgus’s body, but it does not reappear.

“When you came back for me,” Kal says abruptly, “did you plan this?”

“No.”

He scans her face, looking for truth, unsure of what he finds. “You still owe me. Remember that, little witch. I’ll collect one day.”

“I know.” She reaches up to kiss his cheek, unnerving him. “Thank you.”

“Now
go
. Follow the tunnel. Uphill, always uphill…”

And now she is running, over the rocks, up the slope, pouring out the dregs of her energy in one final spurt. There is a stitch in her chest crushing the breath from her lungs, and the light is growing, brighter and brighter, until she can no longer see the ground beneath her feet, but still she goes on, dazzled, sightless, until the ground vanishes altogether, and she is falling, falling, into the light.

XIV

Fern dragged herself laboriously from a sleep so deep it was bottomless. Even as she struggled toward consciousness the thought reached her that never before had she slept so profoundly; trying to reawaken was like swimming through treacle, a desperate floundering in clinging blackness. In that last, interminable second before she opened her eyes it occurred to her that she had had too much to drink, and this must be a hangover the hangover to end all hangovers. She couldn’t remember what had happened, but Gaynor must have taken care of her. Then Fern lifted her eyelids. She was in a room she had never seen before, in a white clinical bed with a rail across the bottom. There were soothing blue walls, dawn light streaming through the window, an unnatural quantity of flowers. Hospital. The shock was so great her stomach jolted. She tried to sit up, but her limbs felt weighted and she could barely raise her head. She saw the tubes surrounding her, invading her, the plastic chrysalis of the drip, the dancing line on the monitor. And lastly, to her overwhelming relief, Ragginbone. His hood was pushed back and he was surveying her with an expression she had never seen before, a strange softening that made him appear old like any other old man, tired and weak and human. His scarecrow hair stood up as if it had been kneaded, and there were more lines on his face than a thousand-piece jigsaw.

“I must have been
awfully
drunk,” she said. Her voice sounded very faint, hardly more than a whisper.

“Awfully,” echoed Ragginbone.

After a minute, she asked: “What am I doing here? Was there a car accident?”

“You’ve been ill,” said the Watcher.

“Ill? But—” memory returned, in fragments “—I’m supposed to be getting married. I’m getting married today.”

“That was last week.”

“Oh.” She digested this. “Did I get married?”

“No.”

For no reason that she could analyze, she felt comforted. Her brain tried to grapple with the situation, but it was too much for her, and she lay inert, letting her thoughts float where they would. Ragginbone knew he ought to call a nurse, but he saw no immediate need, and his instinct told him she was best left to herself. The green line on the heart monitor had accelerated to normal, causing the machine no particular concern. He was a little surprised she seemed to feel no pain from her burnt hand; however, the doctor said the nerve endings had been destroyed, and presumably it was still numb.

Some time later, she said: “What a mess.”

“I shouldn’t worry about it.”

She turned her head on the pillow, looking toward him. “Where is everyone?”

“Well, your father was here last night, but he went home for a few hours’ sleep. He’ll be back soon. I believe Miss Markham is at Dale House now, Will and Gaynor are … somewhere, and Marcus Greig is in London, though he’s due here later today.”

“Marcus?”

“Your groom-to-be,” Ragginbone supplied.

“Of course,” Fern murmured. “I’d forgotten … How dreadful.”

He wasn’t sure if her last comment referred to her forgetfulness or Marcus’s absence, but on the whole he favored the former.

Presently a nurse came in, white capped and bustling. “She’s conscious,” said Ragginbone.

The nurse said: “My God!” and bent over the bed, her features melting into an expression of professional satisfaction. “How are you feeling?” she beamed, and, without waiting for a response: “I’d better get you some painkillers. Your hand must be hurting.” As she spoke she looked slightly uncomfortable, evidently embarrassed at the existence of first-degree burns for which there was no logical explanation.

“Painkillers …?” Fern thought about that, and concluded the nurse must be mildly insane. “No, thank you. Could you get rid of all this stuff, please?” She indicated with a twist of her head the drip and the leads connecting her to the heart monitor.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. When the doctor comes”

“Get rid of it.
Please”

“You just lie there and rest, and as soon as the doctor”

“If you don’t get rid of it,” Fern said, the feebleness of her voice belied by the determination underneath, “I’ll pull out the needle and those electrodes and the bloody catheter myself. Now. So just—do it.”

“You’ll do yourself an injury!”

“I don’t care. Anyway, if I do … you can bring me those painkillers you’re so keen on.
Do it!”

“I think you’d better,” Ragginbone said gently, trying not to smile.

With a nervous glance around for absent superiors, the nurse complied, whisking a curtain around the bed to conceal her activities. As Ragginbone shifted his chair aside to avoid obstructing her his feet touched something partially concealed under the bed. A quick look showed him a patchwork bag made of soiled scraps of material untidily cobbled together, evidently containing a fair-sized object, vaguely spherical in shape. He frowned, moving it behind the cabinet, out of the nurse’s way. He knew it had not been there when he came in.

Freed from her medical trappings, Fern noticed something else. “Why is my hand bandaged?” she said accusingly. (Hadn’t the nurse mentioned something about her hand?)

“You you burnt it…”

Fern tried to take this in, and failed. The bandages annoyed her the hand felt perfectly all right but she was too worn out for a further tussle with authority. The nurse, grateful for the respite, checked pulse and temperature, administered a few sips of water, and scurried off to write a report for her ward nurse. Ragginbone moved the patchwork bag farther out of sight and waited.

“Caracandal,” Fern said at last he started to hear her use
his Gift name, something she had never done before—“what’s been happening to me?”

“You went out with Gaynor for your hen night, had too much to drink—”

“I knew drink came into it somewhere.”

“—and passed out. We got you home, in the end, but you wouldn’t wake. You’ve been here for a week, in deep coma. Yesterday evening severe burns appeared on your left hand.”

“How?”

“I was hoping,” said the Watcher, “that you would tell me.”

“I had dreams,” she said, groping in the recesses of her mind. “Very
complicated
dreams. There was a Tree … and a witch—two witches … and a man with a black face … smoke, and—yes—
-fire
…”

After that, she did not speak for a long time.

Robin arrived simultaneously with the doctor, hugged his daughter, damp eyed, and murmured repeatedly: “You should have phoned,” thus impeding the process of medical examination.

“I knew you were coming shortly,” Ragginbone said, but Robin plainly did not expect a response, merely gazing at his daughter with an expression compounded of besottedness and relief.

Fern, who had insisted on sitting up, submitted patiently to the doctor’s explorations. “She
seems
to be making a good recovery,” he told Robin with an air of disapproval. “Of course, it’ll be several days before we can be certain. I’ll change the dressing later, when I’ve had a chat with the ward nurse.” He turned back to his patient. “You just relax, young lady, get lots of sleep, and we’ll have you up and about again in no time.”

“I’ve
had
lots of sleep,” Fern pointed out to his departing back. Her right hand tightened on the veil that was still draped around her shoulders. “Who brought me this?”

“I think it was Gaynor,” Robin said. “Pretty, isn’t it? Can’t say I’ve seen it before.”

“Have I any other clothes here?”

“No,” said her father. “Took them home for the wash.”

“Daddy, would you mind very much going back and getting
me some? I know it’s a chore, but I don’t want to walk out of here in a dressing gown.”

“Don’t think they’re going to let you come home just yet, old girl,” Robin said. Already the habitual look of nebulous anxiety was creeping back onto his face.

“Did you hear that doctor?” Fern said. “He called me
young lady
. He can’t be more than a couple of years older than I am. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just a bit floppy from being in bed too long. All I need is exercise and decent food, and I won’t get either of those here. Please, Daddy.”