The Dragons' Chosen (13 page)

The wolf seemed momentarily confused, staring intently at the space where Chris had been one moment ago. The man slew it with a single swipe of his blade. He spun around, but no living wolf remained. We were alone.

My legs gave out beneath me. I’m sure that I didn’t faint. I would not have. But I was momentarily confused. Chris was gone, and there was gore covering me. I had killed a creature, I, who hurt nothing. And my riding skirt was ripped.

I searched my brain for something to say but I was so cold and weary and everything seemed unclear. There was a dark stain dripping down the man’s leg—blood. Lightning flashed across the sky and four heartbeats later, thunder.

“You’re hurt.”

He finally spoke in a voice hoarse and soft. “It’s nothing. And you, are you harmed, My Lady?”

I looked down at my body, reminded that I had one. Two fingernails were broken and my hair had escaped its net, hanging loose around my shoulders like a tavern girl. “No, I’m not harmed,” I said, shoving my hair away from my face. I shook harder and wrapped my arms around my chest. Something sticky glued my fingers to one another, blood, wolf blood. I held my arms out from me as I made my way to the stream to rinse my hands and face in the cold water. I thought things couldn’t get any worse but then the sprinkling rain became a torrent.

As I rejoined the stranger, he remained silent. He stepped around me, walked back to the mouth of the hollow and checked the fire that Chris and I had started before dragging in another armful of branches. “And your companion?”

I couldn’t think straight. “My companion?”

He blew on the flames before speaking again. “The woman who just disappeared. Where did she go?” The fire snapped and sizzled as he fed it stick after stick, smoke rising from the damp branches.

He pointed to the fire’s side, indicating that I should sit. “Your friend?”

Oh, of course! I swayed. He moved a log into place near the warmth of the fire. “Sit.”

I took a few steps, before sitting carefully on the log.

“Chris? Away, gone.” But now I recalled the sound of her head hitting rock. What if she were dead? Oh Chris. I tried to remember if she had been breathing as she disappeared, but all I could remember was her eyelids closing.

My eyes welled with tears and I turned my face from him. He said nothing more, but continued to feed the flame, though I felt him watching me from the corners of his eyes. He had just saved us, but how did he get here? This was no local woodsman. The fire grew and I came back to myself more and more. Things were not making sense. I tried to pull myself together. Who was this man?

Now I knew that I shouldn’t be thinking of such at a time like this, but this was an awkward situation. I was alone with a male—a young, unknown male, at night, with no town within miles—in a space not much larger than my tent. After some of my recent misadventures, perhaps I should have felt more wary, but he didn’t elicit that feeling. Quite the contrary.

The rain outside our hollow eased into a steady, sullen patter. The fire grew. Four feet away, he stood with his back to me, dragging in more tree limbs and stacking them in a neat pile. I could almost touch him.

“Thank you.”

In the glow of the firelight, I saw him jump at my voice, flinching as though discomforted by my meager words of thanks. He turned part way but didn’t lift his face to me. “Anyone would have helped.”

“But you did and I am grateful.”

He nodded before sitting down and removing his boots and socks, turning them upside down on two sticks he stuck into the ground. I tried to look away from his bare feet.

I had no chaperone, and I didn’t even know his rank or where he hailed from. He was disheveled; his leggings were ripped and blood seeped down his knee. For all his protestations, he had been injured while aiding me. But something was wrong. He wasn’t questioning what I was doing in this wood. He didn’t ask my name. He was surprisingly incurious about finding two women in the middle of nowhere—especially when one of them vanished before his eyes. And what was a fighting man doing in the middle of the forest beyond the Perpinans? Only Tom Mastin knew the way.

He began cleaning his sword, scraping off the blood that covered the blade.

In that moment I grew alert, more so than I had been in weeks. All warm thoughts were pushed to the side as my mind circled and re-circled the discordance here. Many uncomfortable questions leapt into my mind, none of which I could bear to ask the man seated across from me. But even without the wolves, I was positive that I did not wish to be alone. And though his face was bare, masked somewhat by his hood, he felt familiar to me—the turn of his head, the slope of his shoulders, those long, callused fingers, his voice. They all called to something in my memory, something that fostered a sense of comfort, of familiarity. I waved my hand before me to dispel the smoke that rose from the fire, and another scent drifted in the smoke—foreign spice, his scent. I leaned toward him, drinking it in. I’d smelled it before, but where?

He offered me some dried meat, and we chewed in a peculiar camaraderie. While I felt oddly comfortable, given the circumstances, he seemed shy or perhaps on his guard. It was an evening of silence—me, shaken and exhausted; he, obviously ill at ease, retreating into the mundane rituals of cleaning his sword and feeding the fire. Yet he still didn’t ask me anything, not my name, not why I was here.

Explanations could wait until the light of day. I could barely keep my eyes open as he shifted things around to arrange a space for me to sleep.

“You’re about to fall over. I’ll keep watch.”

I slept so deeply that I may truly have passed out. I awoke at first light to hear George shouting my name over and over. The fire embers still glowed, the remaining coals carefully banked to keep me warm. I lay between the fire and the radiating stone wall, warm and safe. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. My torn snood lay near me, rolling my memory back to the night before. As I was falling asleep, had I felt his finger brush across my face? And heard words spoken softly. “If only. I regret how this must end.”

I dismissed my fantasy as I tucked my hair back into the snood and straightened my clothing as best as possible, oddly feeling bereft of his presence and trying not to imagine how I must have looked during the night. My knife lay near me, cleaned.

Lucinda raced to my side, muttering threats about my horse. She and George had found dead wolf bodies, a half-mile away—nowhere near where I was. Markers had been burned into the trees leading the way to my shelter. And Chris’s horse and mine tied down nearby.

It wasn’t possible for my rescuer to have moved the wolves that far by himself. And, like Chris, he too had disappeared.

Chapter 17

The questions came and I had no answers.

“Where is Chris?” Captain Markus asked.

“Gone.” I closed my eyes, praying to the Goddess that Chris lived.

George looked at me quizzically. “Who killed the wolves?”

“A strange man, a warrior.”

Lucinda spoke then. “Alone, with a warrior, all night?”

I hesitated, trying to recall the half-remembered caress, was it real? “Yes.” And though nothing improper had occurred, part of me wished it might have.

Lucinda must have seen my hesitation as she almost had apoplexy. If I weren’t sick with despair, I might have inquired if she would have preferred that I spent the night with the wolves.

No, I didn’t see any blazon, no coat of arms. No, I didn’t know where he went. Yes, I was fine.

I refused to answer any more questions. My heart was weary. Chris was gone and I didn’t know if she still lived. Nothing more mattered.

George looked as if he wished to ask me something more but reconsidered, falling back on saying, “There’s a brave girl.” I wanted to stamp my foot and say I wasn’t brave. That I wished there were no dragons, that my only challenge was managing my entourage. I longed for the comforts of my castle room with its soft bed and thick carpets, but I was too tired, too exhausted to make a fuss.

I could sense them looking at me, looking at my scratched arms and broken fingernails, sure that something must have happened, something I wasn’t willing to mention. My hair broke loose from my snood as I turned away, strands of the frayed netting hanging limp against my neck. I pulled the ragged remains of the net from my nape, feeling my hair fall in a tangle down my back. Though nothing untoward had occurred, how could they think otherwise?

My mind went back to the man from last night. Did he truly say something about
my end
or was that a dream?

The captain barked out orders to his men to search for my rescuer. Though he spent half the morning, the man wasn’t found. Neither was our pig. Eventually, we had to leave and continue our journey. I forced myself not to search the sky for emerald scales and wings, not to listen for that bugling trumpet or the leathery whoosh of wings
.
Nor look for a sword-wielding stranger.

The next day, the land changed and we slowed to a crawl. I had almost recovered from the night before, but was always worrying about Chris and mulling over the man who protected me. I could still see in my mind’s eye the flash of his sword. My thoughts kept circling back to it, round and round, something I should have noted. I was sure it would come to me once I had a restful night’s sleep.

We traveled that day through pines and thick shrubby brush into low marsh lands, the fens. Each of us followed single file on a narrow elusive pathway, walking our horses carefully so as not to disappear into the water with its sinkholes and snakes. It was a land so covered with midges and small flying insects that the ground seemed to vibrate if stared at too long.

There were many things of beauty. The fens had a splendor of its own. Through mists that covered the ground, one could see trailing moss hanging from the few straggling trees that clung on low earthen mounds. There were birds, large wading birds—herons, ibis and storks, some that I had only read about—stalking about in the low water or standing like statues waiting for careless fish to come their way. In the occasional clump of brush, I heard the grunting of stoat and the accompanying squeal of piglets. Once, cloaked within the reeds, I spied a fox carrying a small water bird in its mouth.

After inhaling one too many small insects, I put a veil of netting across my face. The whine as they hovered around my head was almost intolerable. The horses had it worst of all, constantly harried by the creatures. I wiped off little flecks of blood from Winter’s neck. He fidgeted beneath me, rippling his withers and swishing his tail, as we slogged across the spongy ground.

Tom grunted, speaking over my head to the captain. “We’ll be out from this by late afternoon. It’s only twenty miles at this crossing. Once we head up into the mountain pass, we leave the midges behind.”

Our cart creaked along in front of me, bumping over uneven ground as it was dutifully pulled by a pack horse. It rumbled over a ditch, landing on the other side with a crunch, then lumbered on like a drunkard, tipping precariously side to side. Something was wrong. I opened my mouth to speak when Jonathan swore. “Captain, the cart looks like it’s not going to make it.”

The axle was broken.

I could hear Captain Markus telling me that all the cart really did, now that the pig was gone, was hold my chair. His mouth moved but I refused to hear him. They unstrapped the chair, abandoning it on the side of the path. Spikes of despair combed through my brain as I watched water lap its base.

I dismounted and walked over to it. My courage abandoned me.

The chair had empowered me, a thread of stability that led back to home and family and self. It had given me a sense of hope and held me to who I was. A symbol of all that was and would never be again—and there it lay, discarded like an old piece of clothing that no longer held its splendor. Lucinda came up behind me and hugged me to her ample bosom. I lay my head on her shoulder for a moment before turning and preparing to remount.

George awkwardly patted my back as if I were a horse to be quieted. Lucinda offered to brush my hair into the elaborate swirls I had worn since I was turned out at sixteen, but I refused. I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I longed for Chris, yearned for her presence. I knew she would return if it were possible. But what if she was dead? Once again I remembered the crack as she hit the rock. I started listing the princesses again: Teresa, Anisette, Ophelia, Isabelle,