The Dragon's Son (15 page)

Draconas—doing the same thing.

A DRAGON BLINKED ITS EYE AND TEN YEARS PASSED.

Humans laughed and cried and lived and died and ten years passed. Ven roamed
the forest and checked his rabbit snares and raced the wildcat on his loping
beast’s legs and ten years passed. Marcus practiced with his fencing master and
his dancing master and studied with his tutor and fell asleep over his lessons
and ten years passed. Grald and Maristara plotted and schemed and searched and
ten years passed.

Draconas walked and watched and waited for those
ten years to pass. . .

“I’m going to the faire with you this year,” Ven said abruptly.

Bellona looked up from her sewing in astonishment. He’d made his
announcement and then returned to his work, seemingly uninterested in her
reaction. His eyes were lowered, concentrating on the fletching of his
arrowheads, making good use of the dwindling light before night set in. She
could tell by the red flush on the back of his neck and the rigid set of his
jaw what pain this decision had cost him.

She went back to her work.

Bellona was not a good seamstress. The hands that wielded a sword with such
skill were clumsy and impatient with the needle. She had no choice, however.
She sewed the clothes they wore and they constantly required either making or
mending. Ven had grown rapidly in the past ten years, and it seemed that she
had no sooner sewn him a pair of wool breeches or a wool tunic, but that he had
split out the seams in the thighs or could no longer fit his muscular arms into
the sleeves.

Jabbing the needle in the cloth, she said evenly, “I will be glad of your
help.”

He lifted his head then, regarded her from beneath his lowering brows. He
was suspicious, thinking she accused him.

She raised her gaze to meet his.

The flush spread from the back of his neck to the front and extended up into
his face.

“I am sorry,” he said gruffly. “I know I have not been much use to you these
past few years.”

Bellona lowered her gaze to the thread, tugged it through the hole. “I
understood.”

“Did you?” he demanded, challenging.

She raised her eyes again. “Yes.”

He lowered his before her steady gaze. He went back to his work, then
impatiently shoved the arrows aside, stood up, and walked out the door. She
watched him lope down the path, watched him with the eyes of strangers, those
they would meet on the road, traveling to the faire.

As Ven grew older, his body altered. If his legs were disguised, he could
almost pass for a normal human youth. He tended to spring off his long, clawed
toes, rather than placing his heel down first and rolling forward on the foot,
as do humans, and he practiced long hours at walking like a human. His legs
were still the legs of a beast and he still had a peculiar gait—as though he
walked with slightly bent knees—but his gait could be viewed as an oddity, not
a deformity.

At age sixteen, Ven was a comely youth, from the waist up. His upper body
was well developed from hard, physical labor and daily practice with bow and
sword and spear. His blond hair had darkened to russet gold. He kept it cut
short for ease. His eyebrows were thick and brown and formed a bar across his
face—a bar that was, to Bellona’s fancy, like a heavy wooden bar dropped across
a door.

He had no beard. No hair grew upon his chest or groin, and it was becoming
apparent to Bellona that it never would. She knew he felt the lack and was
pained by it, for she often saw him staring at himself in the still waters of
the icebound pond, rubbing his jaw, which was strong and gaunt and jutting, and
yet smooth as any maid’s.

His eyes were the same blue as his mother’s, made darker by the heavy brows,
so that where her eyes had been flame, his were shadow.

Bellona watched him until he vanished among the twilight-dappled trees.

After that disastrous experience at the faire when he was six, he had
refused to go with her to the faires anymore. He remained in the forest by
himself. Bellona compared the danger of leaving a little child alone in the
forest with the danger of taking him to the faire, and she opted for the
former. She understood his reason for not wanting to go back among people. And
she understood why he made the decision to return to the world now. She had
seen the restlessness growing on him for years, seen him wrestling with
himself, his need fighting with his fear. She understood the need, as she
understood the fear. She did not know what to do about either. She felt
helpless when it came to Ven. She did not know what to say to him, what to do
for him. She’d felt this way for ten years.

Bellona did not feel a mother’s love for Ven, but she had always believed
there was a bond between them—that bond was Melisande, the mother he had never
known. Bellona had taken it for granted that Ven must love his mother. She had
been disabused of this notion ten years ago on their return from that
di-astrous journey to Fairfield.

Bellona had regained consciousness with only a vague memory of the faire
itself. She remembered nothing of the attack. She questioned Ven about it, but
his answers were vague. He said only that they’d been waylaid by thieves.

One day shortly after their return home, she found Ven standing beside her,
watching her. She looked into the blue eyes, in which she was accustomed to see
her image reflected back to her, and she did not see herself.

She saw Ven.

Bellona had once been stranded by a blizzard in the mountains of Seth.
Seeking escape from the blinding snow and the flesh-numbing cold, she sought
shelter in a cave, only to discover that the cave was already inhabited. She
had no light, so she had not been able to see what kind of wild animal lurked
in the darkness, but she knew it was there. She could feel the anger at her
intrusion and the threat and she left the cave, willing to risk death in the
blizzard, rather than being torn apart by savage claws.

Ven’s eyes were the cavern. Inside was darkness.

“What do you want, child?” Bellona demanded, recoiling.

“Am I my mother’s curse?” Ven asked, his voice quavering.

Bellona stared, aghast. She remembered his question in the forest.
Why am
I like this? Who made me like this?
He had not wanted to hear the answer
then, but he’d been thinking about it.

He had come to the conclusion that he was the product of a twisted passion.
His mother’s curse.

Bellona knelt down in front of Ven, to be at eye level. No need to explain
the act of copulation to him. He knew how baby squirrels and rabbits and foxes
came into being. He’d seen deer rut, wild cats mate, robins tumbling over each
other in a flurry of red bosom and black feathers. He knew what he was asking
and now Bellona understood his anger. She told him in a few blunt and brutal words
of the rape. She spared him nothing. She told him how she had found his mother
after the dragon had finished with her—found her torn, bleeding, terrified,
ashamed.

“Melisande had no need to be ashamed,” said Bellona harshly. “What happened
was not her fault. You are
not
your mother’s curse.”

The words “You are your father’s” were left unsaid, but Ven heard them.

After that, their lives continued on much as they had before, with one
exception. The next year, as Bellona started to perform Yen’s customary birthday
ceremony, she summoned Ven to stand before her and drew in a breath to invoke
Melisande.

Light flared suddenly, like the striking of quickmatch, in the cavern of Ven’s
eyes. Bellona saw in the blaze the soul crouching there—wary, raging, threatening.

Melisande’s name sighed out of Bellona, drifted into the birdsong silence of
the spring day, and was lost. She never again celebrated Ven’s birthday, nor
was it ever mentioned between them.

Bellona tore her thoughts from Ven to return to the detested sewing. She
wielded the needle as she might have wielded a sword against a foe, battling
with grim determination to finish the task at hand.

Ven would need these new breeches and a new shirt,
since he was going with her to the faire.

Leaving the shack to Bellona and her needlework, Ven sought refuge in his
cave. Now that he had said the words, he found himself shaking from the
reaction. To speak his decision aloud had made it real, given it shape and form
and substance. He could not go back. If he did, if he stayed hiding in his
cave, as part of him longed to do, Bellona would take him for a coward, and she
despised cowards. Worse, he would despise himself. And so would the other—the
voice that urged him to go out into the world and make the world his own.

Ven never answered his father’s voice. He never communicated with the dragon
or with Draconas, though both had tried at various times during these past ten
years to communicate with Ven. He had never spoken with the third voice,
either. The voice that was distant and rarely heard and seemed not to be
speaking to him, but to itself. He liked that voice, for it was not a dragon’s
voice. He didn’t know whose voice it was or why he could hear it, but he liked
it. The voice wanted nothing of him and, although it did not talk with him, the
sound of the voice made him feel less alone. He never answered it. He never
answered any of the voices. To do so would be to admit that he was the dragon’s
son, and that was something he did not choose to admit.

He repudiated his dragon father as he repudiated the dragon half of his
body. He seemed almost to believe that if he willed himself to be human, the
cold, dry, blue scales would melt into soft, warm flesh. He knew deep inside
him that this was not going to happen, but he had some vague sense that
conceding to the dragon part of him would weaken the human. He determined that
he would be human—or at least be taken for human—no matter what the cost.

As for the dragon magic, he had not used it since the day he had killed that
man.

The killing had shaken Ven. It had been so easy. It had felt so good. The
way a dragon feels, he thought, when it slays a human.

Ven carried the fantastical images, the beautiful colors and shapes he saw
in his mind, into the darkest part of his cavern and flung them into a deep
crevice. The magic was still alive down there. Sometimes, he would see the
images trying to claw their way up from the depths. Sometimes he would hear
them whisper to him temptingly, as he heard his father’s voice. He turned his
back on them. Resolutely, he ignored them. He concentrated, instead, on being
human. He would make the human world his own without help from anything dragon.

Yet how much it had cost him to say the words
I am going with you to the
faire.

Ven lowered his head into his hands. His fingers clawed at his skin and his
hair, so that the pain brought tears to his eyes. He was afraid.

He was afraid of leaving the forest in which he’d hidden all these years. He
was afraid of staying.

He was afraid of the staring eyes, the sneering lips, the smug pity. He was
afraid of his loneliness.

He was afraid of the sexual urges that flooded his body with warmth and
bliss and then, when they drained out of him, left him restless and
dissatisfied, for his dreams were airy nothings and he wanted to feel, to
clasp, to hold and to be held. He wanted to give achingly of himself and be
received with aching pleasure. In his fantasy, his legs were flesh and blood,
the illusory legs that Draconas had conjured up for him that day at the faire.
The legs that twined with a woman’s legs were never the legs of the dragon.

His longing overcame his fears. The longing and the need to prove himself to
himself. He’d said the words. There was no going back. He rose to his feet, the
clawed feet, the feet of a dragon, and he shook himself, shook off doubt and
torment.

The sun had set.

Night had fallen in the forest.

The animals that hunted by day sought their own dark sanctuaries. Those that
hunted by night were out and on the prowl. He could sometimes see the yellow
eyes staring at him from the tangled undergrowth, freezing into stillness until
he passed. He walked easily in the darkness, for he had the dragon gift of
sight that changed night to twilight, and he feared nothing here.

The bear, the wolf, the wild cat all feared him.

He went back to the dwelling place to get what
sleep he could, for he and Bellona would be up before the dawn, loading the
furs onto the wagon, to have a full day of sunlight in which to travel.

THE FAIRE THEY WERE ATTENDING THIS YEAR WAS NOT a country faire, as was the
faire at Fairfield. This was a city faire, one of the largest on the continent,
held in the cathedral city of Rhun, the capital of Weinmauer. Bellona had
attended this faire for the first time last year and it had proved to be most
profitable. And, she figured, there was safety in numbers. The more eyes there
were, the more sights there were for eyes to see. The less likely those eyes
might find Ven.

Bellona had not forgotten Draconas’s warning about Yen’s father. She had not
forgotten his tale of holy sisters who were far from holy and monks who were
mad. The years had blunted the warnings, however. She had been to many faires
during that time and kept close watch and she had seen nothing to make her suspicious.
Admittedly, she had not brought Ven with her, but she didn’t see why that
should make a difference. If there were mad monks searching for him, she must
have run across them at some time. She looked intently at all she met and even
broke her customary silence to speak to some, and they were what they appeared.

She kept watch for Draconas, too, but she did not see him either. He had
seen her, but she never knew that.

Besides, Ven was no longer a child of six. He was a man now, strong and
formidable, trained in handling sword and dagger, bow and arrow. He had the
means and the skill and the courage to defend himself against any foe—any foe
armed with steel, that is.