Dragon's Keep (18 page)

from
this war? Don't worry, Rosie. We'll win out for
Empress Matilda. I'll see you married soon."

"No," I pleaded, but Father gently
pulled my hand away and stepped aside to grace Mother with a gift. Another
cross, though
more jeweled than mine.
Mother's was covered in emeralds and
boasted
three sapphires the color of her eyes. She wept silently as
Father
slipped it round her neck. Then the king went down on one knee and Mother
scattered salt over his head.

The women on shore tossed salt on their good
men as well, praying for their safe return, for many fighting men were set to
sail with their king that day and join Empress
Matilda in her war.
Father gave a grand speech that promised victorious
return,
then
under the flurrying flags he boarded his
vessel.

Trumpets playing, drums pounding, the ship
set sail for
France
where the empress waited to gather her armies
against King
Stephen. More than one good woman wept as the white sails
caught the wind, so my tears and Mother's were
among the many.

Mother and I went to Saint John's chapel more
often in the days after Father's departure. We spoke little, preferring silence
and prayer. So ardent were our pleas to Heaven, nine and twenty candles in the
chapel burned down to their stubs.

How my knees ached from praying and my ankle
throbbed. But Mother was with me all the while, and she never complained,
though I saw her strain and wobble when she stood after hours of prayer.

"Go back to your tapestry," I said
one day as we left the chapel.

Mother didn't speak. She'd never in her life
been weak. Iron-
willed, Father said of her.
Now that he was gone the iron seemed
to have seeped from her core. She
still performed her duties and
Sir Magnus
stayed close by. The mage took full advantage of her
fears, drawing up
daily astrology charts predicting Father's for
tune in battle and quizzing the heavens to determine the best date
for
our own future journey. When the stars displeased Mother, he treated her with
more honeyed poppy and soused her forehead with rue and vinegar to becalm her
headaches.

Mother grew thinner and more brittle. More
days than not
her eyes shone and her motions
quickened as if she suffered fever.
Long into the night I heard her
pacing in her chamber, which was just above my own.

"She's ill," I told Sir Magnus.

"Her moon is influenced by Saturn,"
he mumbled, rubbing the mole on his neck. Then he went back to his crow's nest
to consult his charts. Great help he was.

Cook tempted us with
roast peacock, with jellies, and sweets.

"Eat," urged Mother across the
table, her platter as untouched as mine. "You should be a plump and healthy
bride."

Bride.
A sour word.
I had no heart
for Henry now. My heart had sailed away. Still, I was grateful at first when
Mother found
new occupation readying the
gowns for my wedding. She seemed
to take some solace in the work. But
soon she was stitching day and night. So what I'd hoped to be a cure only
seemed to worsen her condition.

"Mother, slow your pace," I said.
She would not. As soon as
the stars aligned
we'd sail for Wales and meet the holy man who'd

healed
the girl with the severed arm.
Once cured, we'd set out for
Empress
Matildas court. She would have me wed by summer, and her plan was
all-consuming.

-April ended, a fool's month for those
foolish enough to love. On the first of May the Maypoles were raised on the
wide field atop Twisters Hill, as they were every year. Mother laid a new blue
gown across my bed.

"Look what I have for you," she
said proudly. "It's blue as a spring sky. Now all the islanders need to
see how well you look before your wedding day."

I kept my cheek to the pillow. "My ankle
aches."

Mother slipped a glass vial in a pouch.
"Tuck this in your cloak," she said. "Sir Magnus made you your
own honeyed poppy for the pain."

"I'll stay here."

"It's May Day,
Rosalind!"

"You're ill,
Mother," I said as calmly as I could. "Stay with me."

"A queen performs
her duties," she insisted breathlessly, then
fled into the hall.

I felt like a spent bloom in the heat of her
wind. I went, and
not because she ordered
me but because she was becoming more
and more frayed each day. I would
keep her in my sight.

In the high meadow atop Twister's Hill I
watched the villagers gobbling their May Day feast. Mother and a small group
of elderly knights presided at the high table with Sir Magnus and Father Hugh,
but I'd refused to join them, having no stomach for it. From my place on the
hill I thought Mother seemed to be her old self, but she was always proper in
public.

The maidens came round the Maypole. All
bedecked in flowers, they clung to their ribbons, their hair a-tousle with the
wind as they wove in and out to the piper's song "Here We Go
A-Maying." Each girl whispered her lover's name into the other's ear as
she passed by, weaving her ribbon in and out. I held my chair whispering the
name I'd say if I grasped the ribbon in my glove. I'd call my lover's name with
such a force the Maypole would crash down and set all the maids to weeping.

Cook brought me wine. I poured in some poppy
potion and drank to ease my throbbing foot and aching head. I'd had my chair
set where the wind was stirring and the grass was twisting
round, knowing it was in this very place long ago
Lady Aster was
whisked away to Heaven.

"The lady flew upward like a leaf in a
whirlwind," Marn once said. "And didn't the people hear angels
singing as she spun
up to the clouds?
Ah," she said. "And still today if ye stand in that
blessed
spot, ye can feel a waft from Heaven."

Indeed, there was a soft breeze blowing on
the hill. As the merry piper's tunes wrapped chains about my heart I longed for
a wheeling wind to come to Twister's Hill and sweep me up to Heaven, but the
wind was too weak to lift me.

I did not know then how strangely my wish
would be answered. That I would be swept into the sky before the twilight
fires on the hill were lit.

But it was not God's hand that lifted me.

_Taken

N
one seemed to note
the sudden warmth in the
air, nor
think the
redness in the sky above was any more than the tracings of the setting sun.
But swift the dragon came and from behind, the terrible stench of him and the
pounding of his
wings
too late a warning for us. Soon
all were howling, "Dragon!" and running in his forewind.

I stumbled from my chair as the beast spat a
line of fire be
fore the scattering
villagers. A group of dragonslayers, bellies full
of beer, reeled for
their stack of weapons, but the dragon hurled the pile of swords and shields
over the cliff, where they clattered to the rocks. The castle guard and a
handful of elderly knights stood then and drew their swords, but their weapons
seemed little more than prick-pins to the beast, and before the knights could
rush up the
hill,
the dragon swooped down, grabbed me
in his talons, and lifted me above the crowd.

I tried to scream but the dragon's talons
encircled me like prison bars. I sucked in a sickened breath and yelped,
"Mother!" kicking the air like a mouse in a cat's claw.

Below, Mother stood fast with her paltry
escort of castle guards, hobbling knights, and drunken slayers, our best
fighters having gone off to war.

"Release her!" she shouted and the
knights about her held their swords higher.

"I've come for what is mine!"
growled the dragon, pounding the rocks with his great tail. He wheeled about,
took a step, and swung me over the cliff. Far below waves crashed on the rocks.
Pain tore my chest. My ankle throbbed. Piss ran down my legs.

"Ah, God!"
I cried, my feet swimming in air, my soiled bandage
blowing like a battle flag.

"Shall I release her now?" called
the dragon.

"Don't toy with her!" commanded
Mother, looking small as a poppet from where I hung. "She's a princess!
Take another girl to eat!"

Hearing this, the village maidens howled and
smeared dirt across their faces to look less appealing.

The dragon drew me in closer. The cliff edge
below me now, I flailed and kicked against his golden belly with my unbroken
foot. His scaly flesh was hard as the garden wall I'd once kicked in a bad
temper.

"I choose this one," said the
dragon, holding me above the revelers.

Mother stood like a
willow, her green gown billowing. "If
it's
royal blood you want," she called, "take
me!"

I felt the dragon shudder, the whole of him
like a quaking mountain.

"No, Mother!" I screamed. He
squeezed me tighter. Mother held out her hands as if to lift a babe.

"Leave her be! You cannot have the
twenty-first princess!"

"More stink of human prophecy!"
roared the dragon. "She's mine by rights. Shall I show these people
why?"

Mother's jaw fell. She raised her arm to
caution her knights who stood ready with their swords. How I longed for her to
scream, "Show all!" I was ready to
remove my glove and bare my
claw to the stricken revelers on the hill if
it would save my life, but Mother stood aloof, and my arms were pinned to my
sides by the dragon's grip.

Ah, Judas, I saw the war across my mother's
features then. She would have given her own life, or let the dragon feast upon
the villagers one by one to spare me, but she could not move against this
threat. A cold wave of shame swept through me as I saw my mother's eyes go hard
before the dragon.

The beast reared back
and laughed. All stood below me, fixed
as
threaded cloth in a tapestry. The queen with her assorted knights, villagers,
maidens
smeared with soil—and the only thing that moved was
the wall of fire crackling behind.

The dragon pivoted, leaped from the high
cliff, and plummeted to the sea. My screams were lost in the breaking of the
waves. Lifting like a kestrel, he drew me skyward. Salt wind washed over me,
chill and thick as water. I bit my lips against it and turned for one last look
at Wilde Island.

My death was soon and
certain; theirs still a shadow stalking.
And
strangely, as the dragon rushed me from my life, I pitied those left on the
hill whose death day still crouched in some

unknown
place, biding until the hour it would spring out and
devour.

The island grew smaller as we sped over the
sea, the wind tearing at my face and blowing my legs backward. But jailed in
the dragon's claw, I was strangely hot. I could feel the heat pounding in his
blood, and his scales were like the warming stones Marn used to lay beneath my
quilt in winter.

The dragon's grip had loosened some, and it
pained me less to breathe. Still, my back and hip bones ached in his rough
hold. And my broken ankle throbbed as my legs swam in the abyss.

I worked to free a hand and grip my cross.
"Saint George, deliver me," I called. "Send your angels armed
with Heaven's swords."

The creature lifted higher to the clouds. My
ears filled with
the thunder of his wings. I
was like a wee fish caught and dragged
under a galleon in a deep red
sea.

It was dawn before we reached the isle of
Dragon's Keep. Gray light spilled on the shore as the dragon flew over the
cliffs. Pine trees and rowan swayed beneath his pumping wings. He landed near a
waterfall, entered a cave, and flung me down. I lay on the sandy floor panting
and cradling my broken ankle as the dragon lit a fire.

He towered over me, his head swaying to some
inner breeze
like a great tree in the wind,
the green skin ruffles that grew from
the sides of his head flapping.

"Why bring me here to eat?" I said.

"Did your father not bring his hunt
home?"

I shuddered. Marn had taught me to breathe
deep in times of trouble, but with each attempt, pain shot through my bruised
chest. Clumsy as a drunkard, I wrapped my soiled
bandage around
my ankle splint.

"How did you break yourself?" asked
the dragon, his voice deep and grinding as the miller's wheel.

"A
fall from my horse."

"And the gashes down your arm?"

"Wolves."

"Ah, then you have
known the feel of teeth!" said the dragon.

A smile seemed to cross the dragon's snout.
And I saw how yellow his sharp teeth were.

A swirl of smoke rose above his twitching
nostrils. "Tasty," he said, closing his eyes and flicking out his
tongue.

I crawled into the shadows near a large sand
mound.

"You cannot hide from me." The
dragon laughed, his eyes still closed. "I can smell human flesh from a
hundred wingspans." He licked his jaws and sniffed.

Blood sang in my ears. Was there no way out?
Quick, I patted about in the shadows, feeling the coldness of the sand through
my gloves. If there were a sharp
stone,
or . . . Here
was something. Heart pounding, I pulled it closer: a fish spine.

The dragon's laughter rang like the
stonemason's hammer. "There are no weapons here," he said, "but
the one you were born with."

He inched closer, his golden belly glinting
in the firelight.

I crept backward past a great tall mound.
"How do you know of my mark?"