The Dragon's Son (12 page)

“You’ll bring him back to us,” Ermintrude said. “Even if it’s for ... for
... a proper burial.” Her voice failed her on the last words, but Draconas
understood.

“I will bring him back,” he promised.

Gunderson had been holding the horse’s head. He let loose. Draconas released
the brake on the wagon’s wheels, and gave the reins a flick. Horse and wagon
moved slowly.

The night was clear and chill for spring, the sky iced over with stars.
Draconas clucked to the horse and flicked the reins on its rump. The horse
broke into a trot and they rattled off down the road. Draconas wanted to put
distance between himself and the king, in case Edward changed his mind.

Glancing back to check on the boy, Draconas saw to his displeasure that the
child was still awake. He realized irritably that if his parents had given him
poppy juice, as he had instructed, either it wasn’t enough or it wasn’t having
the desired effect.

He looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Draconas.

And then Marcus did more than look. The boy walked straight into the lair of
Draconas’s dragon mind, a place no human had ever been, a place no human knew
existed.

“I don’t like you,” said Marcus coldly and
distinctly. “Go away. Leave me alone!”

A HUMAN ABLE TO ENTER THE MIND OF A DRAGON?

In the six hundred years Draconas had lived and worked among humans, he had
never received such a shock. Fortunately Marcus drifted into a drugged sleep
moments after he’d made his startling appearance, so that Draconas was once again
alone with his thoughts—thoughts that were reeling and tumbling like a
performance given by some motley fool.

A human able to enter the mind of a dragon.

At least, Draconas thought he could now guess what was going on in the boy’s
head.

Marcus was eavesdropping on dragons.

The “pretty colors” that Marcus could see were dragon conversations, dragon
thoughts, dragon dreams. The magic in the child’s blood had reacted in a way no
one could have anticipated. It had given him the ability to slip into the dark
shadows of a dragon’s inner lair as an uninvited guest.

Marcus was a quiet, unobtrusive observer; the child sitting silent and
unmoving on the dark staircase that overlooked the banquet hall, watching the
adults dance and talk and laugh. Alone and noiseless, he roamed the streets of
dragon consciousness, pausing beneath a window to hear what was going on inside
a house or standing outside a door to listen. No dragon ever noticed him—tiny
mite of a human child—for no dragon would have ever dreamed in a hundred years
of slumber that such a catastrophe was even possible.

Draconas was bound by dragon law to contact Anora immediately and provide
the Minister with this astounding news. He knew exactly what would happen when
she found out. She would command him to bring the child to her and he would
have no choice but to obey. If he refused, the Parliament would punish his
defiance. They would take away his humanity and, much as he sometimes wearied
of his human form and sometimes cursed it and sometimes even loathed it, he
found that he could not bear the thought of losing it.

Nor could he bear the thought of shutting this child inside a prison. For
that would be Marcus’s fate. The dragons could not dare take a chance on
letting this human roam the world when at any moment he might cease to be a
passive eavesdropper and do what he had done to Draconas—enter a dragon’s mind
and tell it to “go away.”

There was another consideration—Grald.

“His first instinct will be to slay the boy, for he is an immense threat. His
second might be to leave him alive,” Draconas reflected. “Make use of him. What
more potent weapon could Grald use against us? Those wretched monks of his are
not able to penetrate a dragon’s mind. Not yet, at least. If Grald could
capture this child and study how he is able to eavesdrop on dragons, then Grald
could teach his monks to do the same. The damage such humans could do to us
would be incalculable.

“And Grald will find out the truth about Marcus. Sooner or later, Grald will
discover the boy wandering about
his
mind—if he hasn’t already.”

As the wagon rolled and bumped over the ground, Draconas glanced back over
his shoulder at the slumbering child. The night was clear and crusted with
stars and a sliver of moon. He could see the child by the lambent light of
night, a gray light that washed away all color, so that the boy was
corpse-white. He observed the boy’s thin, pallid face; the wizened arms, the
eyes that continued to rove even beneath fast-shut eyelids.

“Creating him was wrong,” Draconas said softly, vehemently. “We dragons
wronged his parents. We wronged this child. The most merciful thing I could do
for all of us would be to stab the boy through the heart now, while he sleeps.
And then I should find his half-dragon brother and do the same to him.”

Draconas slid his knife out of the scabbard. He eyed it thoughtfully, eyed
the sleeping boy.

“Merciful. But not logical.” Draconas slid the
knife back into its sheath. “Grald is not the only one who can make use of
Melisande’s sons. Nor”—he reflected—”is he the only one to break the laws of
Dragonkind. I will not tell Anora. I will not tell Parliament. I will do this
on my own.”

Dragons are a solitary species. They live most of their long lives
internally: thinking, dreaming, studying, pondering. When they converse with
each other, they do so mentally, speaking a silent language woven of threads of
colors. They live their lives in serene isolation, wanting no contact with even
their own kind. All that wing rustling, scale twitching, claw clicking disrupts
thought and scatters dreams. The worst years of a dragon’s existence are those
spent in breeding and raising its young, one reason there are so few dragons in
the world.

Because dragons require solitude, they almost always choose to dwell in
caves. On first leaving the nest, a young dragon roams the world until it
discovers a cavern that suits its needs—one that is large, far from human
lands, and far from the cave of another dragon. Once the dragon has taken over
the cavern, the dragon begins working to build the defenses that serve to
protect it during slumbers that may last a hundred years. Dragons do not defend
themselves not against humans—puny creatures. Dragons defend themselves against
other dragons. Although the Dragon War had ended centuries ago, the memory of
those terrible days when dragon blood stained the rivers red lingers in dragon
dreams and dragon memory. A lair’s labyrinthine passages, illusions, traps, and
secret passages are created to confuse and deter a dragon invader, not a human
one. Dragons have little fear of humans. It is difficult to fear something one
has seen evolve from pond scum.

A dragon’s children are born in darkness and spend their early years in
darkness, seeing no light but the light of the magic inside their own minds.
When they are ready to leave the nest and enter the world, dragonlings must be
introduced to sunlight gradually. They find the experience unpleasant and
intensely painful at first, which perhaps explains a dragon’s natural aversion
to sunlight. Eventually, the dragons grow accustomed to the light, finding it
useful for such pursuits as hunting. Given a choice, a dragon will always seek
out darkness because he feels safer and more secure in the darkness. Knowing
this, Draconas took the child with the dragon blood into darkness. He took the
boy to a cave.

Draconas was at a disadvantage with Marcus. Draconas could understand and
empathize with Ven, the dragon’s son, who had been born with a dragon’s grasp
of the brilliant magic that flared across his mind. Ven was, in many ways, a
younger version of Draconas, learning to wield the magic by playing with it,
tossing it around as the human part of him tossed a ball. In Yen’s case, the
magic had turned lethal, but that was the fault of the human passions that
raged inside him. Ven would have to learn how to control both the dragon magic
and his human passions, a feat that was going to be difficult since he was
refusing to admit to either.

With Marcus, Draconas had no idea how to break magic’s grip on the human
child, the magic that was opening doors that should never have been opened.
Draconas guessed that Maristara and Grald had faced the same problem when they
first started raising children whose blood burned with the dragon magic. The
dragons must have raged to see potentially valuable commodities devolve into
babbling lunatics, enthralled by the wondrous sights they could see in their
minds, sights more beautiful and fascinating than anything in the bleakness and
harshness of their daily lives. Like Marcus, these humans had entered the world
of dragon magic and never returned. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, must have
suffered and died over the centuries as Grald and Maristara experimented with
their human breeding programs, trying to find the perfect mix of dragon blood
and human.

They had partially succeeded in those experiments. Grald had managed to keep
alive some human males with dragon magic in their blood, raise them to
adulthood. And now Draconas knew how that had been achieved and also why the “mad
monks” looked and acted as they did.

“These men are half-starved because, like Marcus, they have no way of
sustaining their bodies when they are in the grip of the magic.” Draconas had
developed a habit over the years of talking to himself, a remnant of his dragon
days. Dragons talk to themselves all the time, preferring not to dilute their
own thoughts by mixing them with the thoughts of others. “And these men are
whipped and beaten because the dragons discovered that physical torment could
jolt the humans back to reality . . . but pain brings the humans only partway,
leaves them half in and half out of sanity.

“Such humans have little control over the magic and less control over
themselves. Pain isn’t the answer. Not the complete answer, anyway. Still, it’s
a start.”

Draconas drew his knife, whetted it so that its point was razor sharp, and
waited for the boy to wake from the drugged sleep.

As Marcus stirred and his eyes opened, Draconas observed the boy’s reaction.
The last the child knew he had been inside a small room, warmed by a fire,
surrounded by people who loved him. He woke to find himself alone in a chill
cave in the dark with a stranger. Any other human child would have been
terrified. Marcus only seemed vaguely confused. He blinked once or twice, and
then his gaze turned inward. He caught sight of some bright, drifting dragon
dream and he focused on that. Reality held nothing for this child, not even
fear.

“Because you’re not in a cave,” Draconas told him. “You are in a wondrous
realm of light and beauty. Well, my boy, that is about to end.”

Draconas took hold of the blankets that had been wrapped snugly and lovingly
around the boy and roughly yanked them off. He opened the child’s frilled shirt
at the neck, shoved up the long sleeves, leaving his chest and arms exposed.
Marcus’s flesh shivered in the sudden chill. Marcus’s mind never noticed.

“But you will notice this,” Draconas promised.

He placed the knife’s point on the child’s arm and made a small cut, not
deep, but enough to start the flow of blood.

Marcus winced. His gaze wavered. His attention
cracked, and Draconas was able to walk inside the child’s playroom.

A man stood in the little room, frowning down at him.

Marcus glowered and jumped up from the little chair where he sat by the fire.

“I told you to go away,” Marcus shouted angrily. “Go away and leave me
alone.”

The man didn’t go away. He stood there, looking around the room, making
himself at home.

“Nice world you’ve got here, Marcus,” the man commented.

He looked back at Marcus and his gaze was stern and severe. “But this is
killing you and I want it to stop.”

“Get out,” Marcus ordered. “This is my room. I didn’t invite you to come
inside.”

“I didn’t invite you inside my mind, either,” the man returned. “Yet in you
walked, just as if you owned the place.”

“You left the door open,” said Marcus defensively.

“Maybe I did—” began the man, and then he paused, listening.

Marcus heard the noise, as well. He’d heard it before—the snuffling and
snorting of a dragon trying to find a way inside his room. Marcus saw the
colors of the man’s mind darken.

“You are in danger, Marcus,” said the man. “You have to come with me—now.”

“Go away,” said Marcus.

If he left the room, the dragon would grab him. He hunkered down in his
chair, pretended the man was not there.

The man did not play fair, however. He waved his hand and a staff appeared.
He moved the staff in an arc across Marcus’s mind. Wherever the staff touched
the radiant colors, those colors vanished. Marcus’s chair slid out from under
him, dumping him on the cold floor in a cold and ugly darkness. The man was the
only color, the only light.

Marcus shivered. His arm stung and burned. His belly cramped with hunger. He
wrapped his arms around his thin, frail form, hugged himself, and whimpered, “I
want my mother.”

“No, you don’t,” said the man. “If you did truly want her, you would have
never left home.”

Marcus was startled, wary. He knew this to be the truth, but no one else was
supposed to know it. He’d spent a lifetime hiding it.

He shut his eyes, trying frantically to regain the beauty, but the man
blocked it. The man was inside his head and he was more real in that inner
darkness than he was in the cold darkness that chilled the child’s flesh.

“I don’t want her, because she doesn’t want me.” Marcus whimpered again. “Neither
does my father. They both hate me.”

“Why do they hate you?”

“Because people whisper about me.”

“And when you come in here, the whispers stop.”