The Dragonswarm (3 page)

I knelt before the baron. The three witnesses shifted closer behind him, but I fixed my eyes on the point of the sword where it scarred the polished wood of the study's floor. The edge looked flawless.

"Daven of Terrailles, son of Carrick," the baron began in ceremonious tones, "do you come here with greed or malice in your heart?"

My mouth was dry, my throat tight, but I managed to find my voice enough to ask, "Here, my lord?"

"To the Eliade Barony," he said. "To the land and people under my care." He maintained the formal tone. "Do you mean them any harm?"

My answer came clear and easy at that. "No, my lord. Never."

He gave a grunt in response, then asked, "Daven of Terrailles, son of Carrick, do you come here under loyalty to any man save the king or his appointments?"

I swallowed hard at that. I thought of the rebels, and of their wizard leader who had offered me a place of power among his ranks. He'd asked only that I kill the king.

And I'd had the power to do it. The king struck me as capricious and some of his most faithful enforcers little better than rabid dogs. But he was king. I blinked once and answered honestly again, "I do not. I have remained loyal to the king."

"Daven of Terrailles, son of Carrick, do you come before us the master of any lands or peoples within His Majesty's realms?"

The question caught me off guard. I forgot myself, and looked up into the baron's eyes. "What?"

A frown touched the corner of his mouth, and I dropped my eyes again. He asked, "Have you any titles? Any properties? Any people of your own?"

I couldn't guess at the significance of the question, but I shook my head. "No, my lord. I have nothing."

"Very well," the baron said, pronouncing his judgment. "By the law of this land and of its people, and by the law of God set forth by the king, I pronounce you here and now a Knight of the People." My eyes followed the blade of the sword as he raised it to touch me lightly on each shoulder. "You knelt Daven of Terrailles, son of Carrick, but I command you to rise, Sir Daven of Teelevon, Knight of the People."

I almost disobeyed his order. I knelt still, eyes wide in disbelief as I stared up into his. Then the three men behind him stepped forward with smiles. Thomas gestured me to my feet and I rose in time for him to shake my hand heartily.

And then Isabelle was at my side. I saw tears in her eyes and a smile on her face, and turned back to the baron to find him smiling now, too. It was restrained, but I saw again the kindness he had shown me before. I bowed my head to him. "Thank you, my lord."

He shook his head. "For the service you have done my people, you deserve no less." Thomas and the Kind Father both chimed agreement to that, but the baron ignored them.

His gaze was still solemn. "This ceremony would have better been done before a crowd at the first day of a public festival, but we do not have such luxuries. Great trouble comes with the winter, and we all have dire work to do if we are to survive at all. You have given us a chance."

I nodded. He had given me a chance, too. It wasn't an answer—the title of Knight would not shield me from the king's justice—but if I could weather that storm, the title would make an engagement to Isabelle far less complicated. I held his gaze for a moment, then bowed my head once more. "I thank you again. I am honored and humbled by the appointment."

The baron glanced over his shoulder toward the witnesses, then said to me, "There are rights and responsibilities to go with the title. Among them, you are due a plot of land within my personal holdings. You have not had time enough to see much of them yet—"

Isabelle spoke up right on cue. "I will take him, Father. You have pressing matters. I can be his guide."

Thomas frowned and the Kind Father's eyes opened wide in shock, but both looked to the baron for a response. He sighed and shrugged and nodded with a show of frustrated reluctance. "Very well. I trust him to your hands." He turned to me. "And her to yours. These are dangerous times."

"Then it is well that I have a knight to protect me," Isabelle said. A footfall drew her attention to the corridor behind us, and I turned to spot a stableboy waiting with hat in hand. Our horses were ready.

Isabelle met my eyes, then turned back to the men. "Please excuse us." She dipped her head, turned away, and left. I cast an apologetic glance behind and followed her from the room.

At the stables I found a tall chestnut waiting for me. Isabelle climbed ably into the saddle of her roan and took the leads for both the laden packhorses. Then she caught my eye as I tried to find a comfortable position in my own saddle. When I finally turned her way she gave a little laugh.

"Is everything well with you, Sir Knight?"

I couldn't manage more than an injured grunt. Her laughter died and concern showed in her eyes. "You
can
ride?"

"I can ride," I said. "Not well, but I can ride."

She nodded slowly, then turned and clucked to her horse. She started across the courtyard at an easy walk, and I managed to fall in beside her.

"We'll take it slow," she said. She glanced around, then reached across to squeeze my hand where it gripped the reins too tightly. "We'll make a pleasant ride of it. You'll do fine."

I smiled back, lips pressed tight, then held my tongue while we picked our way out of the little town. It was a laborious journey, my horse dancing erratically to the tension that thrummed through my arms and legs. Isabelle divided her attention between answering cheerful greetings from the townsfolk and whispering advice to me.

When we finally slipped past the last line of houses and out into the wide, empty land outside the town, I took an easier breath. Three paces later I was riding more easily in the saddle, and my horse was keeping a more natural gait. I felt Isabelle's eyes on me and turned to her.

"I never noticed before," she said. "Do city streets really trouble you so much?"

I glanced back over my shoulder toward the town, then shook my head. "Not at all. I grew up in the City. But the little riding I've done has all been in open land."

I turned forward again and looked down the long road at the wide, flat plains stretching all the way to the horizon. "It's easier out here," I said. "There's nobody to hurt with a moment of carelessness."

"Nobody but yourself," she said. "Or me."

Her voice turned soft toward the end, and when I looked I saw her biting her lip and watching me. I couldn't hold her gaze. We rode in silence for a while after that, putting the town far behind us.

I remembered what she had said in the halls of her father's house. I remembered what she'd asked me in the garden, too. Three times I opened my mouth to break the silence. Three times I shut it again without saying a word.

At last she moved her horse half a pace closer to mine. "I didn't know you'd lived in the City."

I looked her way. I shrugged. "I mentioned it the first time we met. At the palace."

She thought for a moment, then gave a slow nod. "You said you were a beggar."

"I was a beggar," I said. "And a carriage driver. And then I left the City to become a shepherd."

She sighed. Her eyes were unfocused, and I saw the hint of tears in them. I reached across to squeeze her hand, as she had done earlier.

"I know so little about you," she said. Her voice shook. "Six weeks we've been together, and I barely know anything." She caught her breath, and a blush touched her cheek. "I asked you to marry me. You must have thought me so stupid."

I shook my head. "I think you're courageous. And impulsive. And I admire you for both. I think you've found a lot of success by deciding what you want or need and pursuing it aggressively. "

She didn't answer that. This time I broke the silence. "I'm sorry I've kept secrets. I didn't want—"

"I know," she said. Her voice was a little raw. "You already said you didn't want me to see you for what you were. I'm just realizing now...."

She trailed off. I gave her time, but she didn't complete the thought. At last I asked her, "What?"

"I'm just now realizing how much you kept hidden."

"I didn't," I tried, then had to swallow hard and start again. "I wasn't trying to hide anything. I just saw no opportunity to bring it up."

"I thought you were joking," she said. "About being a beggar in the City. About being a shepherd, too, no matter how you insisted."

"But—"

"No." She shook her head. "That's not all my fault. You act nothing like a beggar. You act nothing like a shepherd or a fugitive. You may dress the part of a stable hand, but you walk like a soldier and speak like a wizard."

I looked down at the shirt I wore. It was not the finery Isabelle had given me as a gift, but it was far nicer than anything I'd worn for most of my life. The rest...I shook my head. "I never meant to deceive you."

"The worst part," she said, not hearing me, "is how much I loved you."

"Loved?" I asked, hearing too clearly the past tense.

"I fell in love with you the day we met at the palace," she said. "Did you know that? I told Father that very evening that I had met the man I would marry."

She looked over as though she expected an answer, but I had none. "That was foolish," she said. "But sometimes little girls are foolish. Father told me how much you had angered the king. He told me how you left in a burst of fire and smoke, defiant of the crown. It all seemed terribly romantic."

"The king hated me already then," I said. "That was the first step toward my crime. It was on the road from there to the Academy that I killed a man."

She nodded. "I understand that now." She cast a long gaze out over the parched land before us. "I didn't know it then. I knew someone mysteriously turned up on the Academy's doorstep about a week later, bloodied and bruised by the King's Guard, and this dashing hero quickly befriended my scrawny little brother."

I dropped my eyes. "It really worked the other way around."

"Father never made the connection. But I knew it had to be you. I read every letter. I told myself stories about you. I fell more and more in love with this fantasy...."

I couldn't bring myself to look, but I could hear the tears in her voice. I said, "I'm sorry I disappointed you."

"That's just the problem," she said. "I had all these fantasies about you, but I never
truly
loved you until the day you showed up here. My town was doomed, and my family with it. I was captured. All hope was lost. And then you stepped into my tent, every bit the hero I'd imagined you to be."

She caught her breath. I risked a glance, and she was looking right at me. Her smile was bent in kindness; her eyes were drawn in sadness. "And then you stayed. You stayed, and you were real. I made a fantasy out of you, Daven, and then I loved you for making that fantasy real."

She dropped her eyes. She knotted the reins of the pack horses in her hands. "That's all I wanted from you," she said. "That's all I want from you now. I don't want any more apologies. I don't want any more fantasies. I want what's real."

I licked my lips. "And if it's not as good?"

She met my eyes and smiled through tears. "Something real is always better than a fantasy. Always. Have faith in me. Please."

I nodded. Then I said, "Of course. I will." She gave me another smile, and we both took a hundred paces to catch our breath. Then I reached over to squeeze her hand again, and I asked gently, "Where would you have me start?"

"Start in the City," she said. "I have never properly met a beggar before."

I told her my story. I told her of my father who had run afoul of the king's justice and spent the last years of his life rotting in a public prison. I told her of the work I'd done to keep us fed. I told her of the grief that followed after his death, and then the liberty.

We stopped for lunch and I told her how I'd fled to the luxurious Terrailles province outside the City and found a job as a shepherd. I told her of the other boys there I'd trained to fight with the sword, and of the night a Green Eagle from the King's Guard came to interrupt our duels. I told her of the wizard Claighan who had taken me to meet the king, and of his strange and foolish plan to teach me the value of magic.

I told her of the soldier I killed by my own hand.

She kissed me then, while tears burned in my eyes, and sometime later we returned to our horses and continued on to the south. I did not resume my story after that, and she did not ask me to. I would in time, and she knew that. I would keep no secrets from her, but this secret had cost me much in the telling.

So instead she talked for a while. She told me stories about the lands we were passing. She seemed to know every family. She told me about the Carters who had lost seven baby daughters in seven years. She told me about the Dales whose grandfather had been the fifth son of a royal house but who moved to Teelevon for love of a farmer's daughter. She pointed out the broken road that used to lead to Cara, and the hills so rich with iron that the soil here burned red.

And so we passed an afternoon moving farther and farther from civilization. The farms grew further apart as we went, and smaller and smaller. The river Teel still trickled in and out along the rocky earth, but no crops would grow far from its shore. Farms dotted its shallow banks, but everywhere else was red cracked earth.

As we went the horizon grew closer. Ugly, jagged mountains tore at the sky, and even the foothills were hard and sheer. The whole of the continent funneled down to a single point this far south, and the mountains that blocked the coast wedged in on either side of us until our whole vista could not have been more than a dozen miles from left to right.

She finally drew rein at a bit of desert much like all the rest, and as I climbed down I couldn't see why we'd stopped this time. There were trees here—a full pace taller than most of the shrubs we'd passed by—and a bit of a stream, but not much to recommend the place. I took the opportunity to stretch my legs, then finally turned to Isabelle to ask, but she only met my eyes with the spark of excitement in hers.