Meghan's Dragon (6 page)

Chapter 13

The first cluster of human habitations they came across barely qualified as a hamlet. There were six crudely built log cabins, arranged in a rough circle, a palisade connecting each house with its neighbor to create a closed space. A ramshackle tower stood in the center of the protected area, reaching twice the height of the highest cabin roof, with a small platform that might allow two archers to draw a bowstring without knocking each other off.

What the settlement lacked for in amenities, it made up for in children, and all thirty or so of them mobbed the first guests of the day.

“Are you from the castle?” a little girl asked.

“Do you have any candy?” a chubby boy wanted to know.

“My mother sells vegetables and salt meat,” an older girl informed them.

“And mine!”

“And mine!”

Meghan smiled at all of the little faces which reminded her of home. “We’re just traveling through, but we do need to buy provisions,” she replied.

“We haven’t had breakfast yet,” Bryan said hopefully. When Meghan looked at him in disbelief, he added, “That was just a wake-up snack.”

“Travelers pay two coppers a bowl,” the oldest boy in the crowd told them. At eleven or twelve years of age, he already had the callused hands and square shoulders of a young farmhand. “You must have camped out on the road to be here so early. The house with the chimney has the kitchen.”

“Thank you,” Meghan replied. “I’m afraid we didn’t bring any candy. Is there a place nearby where you can buy some to share?” She brought out her own change purse and shook a couple of coppers onto her palm. Bryan scowled, but he didn’t say anything as all of the children began to talk at once. It was impossible to follow their discussion of the relative merits of sweets makers in the surrounding area, but they quickly settled on the oldest girl as their spokesperson.

“Farmer Greswald in the meadows sells maple candy for three coppers a measure,” she said shyly.

“Three coppers it is,” Meghan said, extending them to the girl. “Oh, and we set out before the rest of our party because neither of us likes to ride, but if horsemen come asking for us, you can tell them we were headed for Castle Strongbow.”

“Castle Strongbow,” the children repeated in a chorus. Then the girl with the coppers started off on her way to Greswald’s farm, and the other children went back to their chores or games. The two travelers entered the cabin with the chimney.

“Pretty smart,” Bryan said, “For a minute there, I thought you were giving away treasure for no reason.”

“Treasure?” Meghan asked, as they removed their packs and took seats at the long table built of rough planks. “Three coppers is exactly enough to buy a bowl and a half of whatever they eat for breakfast around here, and I have a feeling that you’re at least a two-bowl man.”

An older woman approached from the smoky fireplace where she had been stirring the contents of a large pot with a long wooden paddle. Her clothes were made of some rough homespun stuff, but they showed that peculiar cleanness that Bryan had come to associate with magically treated fibers.

“Two for breakfast?” she asked in a friendly voice. “We don’t get many this early. You must have been caught by the dark between settlements and camped out on the road.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bryan said, anxious to move things along and find out what was cooking.

“Are you trying to get a free bowl?” The woman regarded the pair suspiciously. “I’m a simple goodwife and that’s more than good enough for me.”

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Meghan said hastily. “My co—husband isn’t from around here,” she added, hoping the woman didn’t notice her verbal slip. Meghan had gotten so used to calling Bryan her cousin in dozens of introductions to curious castle dwellers that it had become second nature.

“Co-husband?” the woman repeated, nodding her head in approval. “I didn’t know you castle folks went in for the old traditions. I have five co-husbands myself, and eight co-wives. Men will run off to war and get themselves killed.” She paused and muttered what might have been a prayer for the departed or a curse against kings. “Well, it’s two coppers a bowl, but seeing how you’re our kind of people, I’ll throw in a pinch of salt for free.”

“Thank you, goodwife,” Bryan answered for Meghan. The girl was at a loss for words on finding she had graduated from playacting a wife to being taken as a participant in a plural marriage without ever having received a proposal.

The woman went back to her pot and used the paddle to fill two wooden bowls with oatmeal. Giving the young couple a broad wink, she reached into a small clay container and added a pinch of salt to each serving. Bryan’s mouth began to water as he rooted through his pack for his eating spoon.

The oatmeal was tasty, but Meghan had eaten two eggs and an apple a few hours earlier, and her stomach began to protest after a half a serving. She looked up to see how Bryan was progressing and found that he was staring at her bowl in rapt attention.

“Here,” she said, sliding it across the table. “At the rate this is going, you’re going to be twice my size by the time we catch up with the players.”

“How much does a horse outweigh a person?” he asked playfully during a pause between heaping spoonfuls. “If I’m ever going to carry you, I have to bulk up.”

Meghan rose to question the woman about the location of their water well, and Bryan powered through the remains of her second breakfast. On finding that the well was on the opposite side of the hamlet from the communal outhouse, she asked for and was granted permission to fill their water skins. Bryan had polished off two more bowls by the time she returned. After paying the woman eight coppers for the oatmeal and receiving one back as a quantity discount, she purchased provisions for the road, and they left the hamlet.

Chapter 14

“So were all those people back in the settlement magicless?” Bryan asked as soon as they reached a discreet distance from the stockade.

“No. What makes you say that?”

“She said it’s a communal marriage, and I just assumed…”

“Oh. I guess I’ve heard it’s the way that people in some rural communities manage things, to keep one person from dominating a group. They all end up sharing what magic they have as equals. Nobody in the castles follows the old ways.”

“They’d fit right in where I came from,” Bryan commented. “Everything here is different than I would have expected, you know?”

“No, actually. What would you have expected?”

“Like, everybody living up to their ankles in manure, and guys riding through on horses and cutting people down with swords. A lot of crying and wailing, people with horrible diseases. You know, a lot darker.”

“Darker than Dark Earth? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, we have modern medicine and everybody goes to school, not to mention indoor plumbing. You guys are living in the Dark Ages, after all.”

“Not in your Dark Ages, we aren’t. Do you think we’re some crippled version of your world that’s stuck in the past because we don’t have your fancy toys?”

“But you already said that the barons are at war all the time and the whole place is ruled by some king who everybody hates. What happens when the soldiers steal the crops, burn down the houses and take the women?”

“Do soldiers do those things on Dark Earth? Here they fight each other. The barons buy food from the farmers to feed the armies and the soldiers wouldn’t fight otherwise. Who burns houses and takes women? If any soldier tried that, the other soldiers would kill him. There are rules about those things, just like there were rules in the kitchen.”

“But if they have the swords and the spears, who can stop them from doing what they want?”

“Why should they want to do those things? They’re soldiers, their job is fighting other soldiers. And if they tried, there are a lot more farmers than there are soldiers, and plenty of them have fighting experience from their own time in the army. Would you want to get in a fight with a farmer who’s sharpened his strengthening magic pulling up tree stumps?”

Bryan though it over for a minute. “Maybe not.”

Chapter 15

By the time the sun was directly overhead, Bryan was hungry again. It didn’t help that he was playing with fire almost continuously now, putting it out only when other travelers came into view. There was just something about producing flames that felt so right to him, but the girl kept pushing him to try something else.

“Look,” Meghan said. “It’s great you can do something magical now because it means I’ll be able to use magic without putting to lie that we’re man and wife. But everybody I’ve ever met can do fire, and unless you’re training to be a war mage, bigger isn’t better. If you’d just put in the effort I’m sure I could teach you something more useful.”

“Like what?” Bryan asked grudgingly. He flicked a ball of flames into the sky, and then cast another one up to intercept the first before it dispersed. “Can you show me how to make food?”

“You can’t just make food out of thin air,” she told him. “You can only encourage things that might have happened anyway.”

“You keep saying that, but what about the farmers giving themselves strength, or Hadrixia’s healings?”

“Those are things that already exist,” Meghan replied patiently. “Farmers and laborers use the memory of strength to add to their ability. There’s a magical cost, of course, and even the strongest mages have a limit to their capacity. Hadrixia uses her magic to help people heal themselves. It’s as if she serves as their—what did you call it? Magical battery.”

“But how?”

“It’s—I can’t explain everything I’ve spent years studying in one sentence.”

“Then start with the ‘Happy truths’ thing. What did Hadrixia learn from nature that would let her do that?”

“You’ve never seen a happy person?” Meghan asked incredulously. “No wonder we call it Dark Earth. And can’t you tell whether somebody is lying to you or being sincere? If you start paying attention you’ll see how things are actually put together, including emotions, and before you know it you’ll be able to reproduce them. But to affect a person directly, like healing, you need physical contact.”

“So you could teach me to make myself stronger?”

“If you have the capacity, yes. But I’d rather you started with some more practical things which you can show off when we’re around other people because that will free me to use more magic myself. Remember, we’re supposed to be in perfect balance.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Bryan offered. “I’ll try to learn whatever you want to teach me until we get to the next place selling food if you pay for lunch.”

“But I gave you all of the money Hadrixia gifted us,” Meghan replied in surprise.

“Well, somebody has to be a saver or we could find ourselves broke.”

“I’m beginning to think I summoned the only dragon in the world whose only talents are eating and hoarding,” Meghan muttered.

“And flames,” Bryan said cheerfully, tossing another fireball into the sky.

“Alright, alright. If you’re so focused on dragon talents, how about we work on levitating?”

“You mean flying?” he asked, obviously intrigued by the idea.

“No. Flying will have to wait until you learn to take on a dragon’s form. Levitating comes in handy for all sorts of things, like my slowing you down when you fell from the tower.”

“But how can you show something like that for me to see it?” Bryan demanded. He immediately felt bad about being so strident when he knew the girl was trying to help him, but something at back of his brain kept telling him he should assert control over his surroundings.

Meghan stopped and reached down to pick up a pebble. Next she displayed it to him between her thumb and forefinger to show there was nothing special about it.

“Now watch closely,” she instructed him. Then the girl tossed it in the air in the direction they were traveling and walked forward to catch it, mouthing commands under her breath. The pebble seemed to take forever to fall, almost coming to a halt before she got her hand under it. Meghan turned to her companion with a small smile of pride, but his eyes were following a little ball of fire he’d quietly flung off.

“Hey! If you don’t pay attention I’m not buying lunch.”

“I tried, but all I could think was, ‘Oh, a flying pebble.’ Who cares?”

“I have an idea,” she said. “Give me your ring.”

“What?” he growled, sticking his ring hand in his pocket to hide it. “Use your own ring.”

“I can’t believe you,” she said in frustration, working her fictitious wedding ring off over her knuckle. “Now watch.”

Meghan tossed the ring in the air, higher than the light pebble had gone, and muttered to slow its descent. Bryan watched with a look of intensity that was almost frightening. If somebody had stuck a log in the road, he would have tripped over it.

“Do it again,” he ordered when the ring came to rest in Meghan’s hand.

She tossed the ring forward again, and this time she got the arc just right, so that with a little magical levitation, it came down in her hand as they walked forward at their usual pace.

“I think I’m getting it,” Bryan said. “Again.”

This time she flipped the ring upwards by flicking her thumb off of her index finger, like children throw marbles. It rotated rapidly, glittering like a small golden ball in the sun. Then a crow came flashing down, caught the ring in its beak, and began flapping away.

“Don’t!” Meghan cried, but a blast of fire from Bryan’s hand had already caught the crow, and it crashed down in a ball of flame. “I could have called it back or followed it to its nest,” the girl said sorrowfully.

“My way works better,” Bryan retorted, striding into the tall meadow grass and making sure the crow was dead with a stomp of his boot. “How are you going to survive out here if you cry over killing a crow?”

She swallowed dryly when he returned with the ring and placed it in her hand. It was barely warm.

“Again,” he demanded.

This time, Meghan was careful to check the sky for birds before throwing the ring.