The First Dragoneer (9 page)

He felt his head wound again, and he was
sure that he was feeling partially-healed scar tissue now. By the
time they finally made it into Crag, Jenka was starting to think
that the dragon really had done something to him. Jenka’s wild,
gray-haired mother came hurrying out into the street to greet her
son, but was waved off by one of the young rangers gathering around
his travois. Without a thought, she shouldered the King’s Ranger
who had waved her away to the side and, after kissing Jenka on the
forehead, she poured a vial of foul-smelling liquid down his
throat.

“You killed a half dozen trolls, then?”
Captain Brody, the head of the King’s Rangers, asked over the
worried mother's shoulder.

Two of the other rangers were razzing the
one she had just bullied aside, but stopped cold when they heard
their captain’s words.

“Here,” Master Kember handed something that
was green and shimmering to his former commander. “The boy said it
was a black, but I found this. It was dark.”

“Dragon scale,” Captain Brody took it and
gave Jenka a dubious look. He reached out and touched the pink scar
under Jenka’s blood-matted hairline and, after glancing down at the
discarded vial of kettle-witch potion, he gave a short snort of
disbelief. To Master Kember he said: “I’ll send a message by
swifter hawk to Commander Corda down in Three Forks. He’ll get a
message to King Blanchard that will be on the next boat to King’s
Island.” Then in a more commanding and enthusiastic tone he said:
“Digger, you and Balkir go round up the Rangers. We’ve got us
another dragon to hunt!”

The King’s Rangers combed the area around
the carnage, but they never found Jade. They did find another dead
troll over the ridge. There was a pinky-sized piece of broken
dragon claw stuck in its wound. The young Ranger who had tried to
hush Jenka’s mother had it drilled and put on a leather thong for
her as an apology. She scoffed at him, but didn’t hesitate to put
it in her pocket. It would fetch a pretty penny down in Three Forks
in one of the hawker’s lots.

Jenka played the wounded young boy as long
as he could fake it, which was only about four days. He limped
around and groaned a lot, but since the morning after they had
dragged him home he had been feeling better than he ever had in his
life. Because of his seemingly quick recovery, several of the
rangers were buying potions from his mother now.

One day, Jenka came in from helping the
baker chop down a bothersome tree and found the small table he and
his mother shared laden with meat and savory smelling vegetables.
He thought that she had just decided to splurge until she turned
from her iron pot and started swatting at him and urging him out to
the trough to get cleaned up for dinner. It turned out that they
were going to have guests at their table this night.

It was only Master Kember and Lemmy who were
going to dine with them, but they were as welcome in the modest,
thatch-roofed hut as the king himself would have been. The old
hunter had come to ask Amelia De Swasso’s permission to take Jenka
to Three Forks and then on to King’s Island, where they would spend
a few weeks in an inn and attend the Solstice Festival, and
hopefully get an audience with King Blanchard. He explained that
Lemmy would be staying behind and would come by and take care of
the heavy chores so she wouldn’t be inconvenienced too much by
Jenka’s absence. He told her that Solman and Rikky were going with
the group to compete in the contests. “We will be travelling in a
well-armed group. It will be a safe and informative journey for
Jenka, I assure you,” Master Kember finally finished.

“I’ll let him go, Marwick Kember,” Jenka’s
mother said harshly. “But don’t you tell me them roads is safe and
all that. I know better. Don’t even try to pull the wool over my
eyes or I’ll shrivel your stones with a hex. Them trolls are
getting riled up ‘bout something, and there’ll be sneak-thieves and
Outland bandits betwixt Three Forks and Outwal, and pirates once
you’re out of the harbor at Port. I was born out on Freemans Reach
and I spent my middling years on King’s Island brewin’ potions for
a Witch of the Hazeltine. Any fool who thinks a journey across the
frontier is going to be safe will pay their price. Now you tell
that handy dimwit of yours to keep me stocked in cut wood, meat,
and bear scat while Jenka’s away, or when you return I’ll … ”

And so it went until the table was cleared.
Master Kember was happy to be on his way. He wasn’t used to being
scolded and harped at, and it showed plainly that his patience was
worn completely through.

During dinner, Lemmy seemed to fade into his
own shadow and did a good job of staying unnoticed, but within
minutes of the serving dishes being removed from the table, he had
the horses ready to go.

To Jenka, the prospect of the journey was
more exciting than anything he could have ever imagined. The group
was to leave at the end of the week on horses the King’s Rangers
would provide. An escort made up of two green Foresters and one
seasoned old Ranger named Herald, who Master Kember always spoke
highly of, would ride with them to Three Forks. That would take
about four days. From there they would hire a wagon and travel for
another day with an armed caravan until they were on the other side
of the Great Wall that separated Port and Mainsted from the wild,
mainland frontier. In Port, they would board a ship and sail to
King’s Island. Then there was the audience with the king, and the
Solstice Festival to look forward to. It was all Jenka could do to
keep still. His only regret was that Grondy wouldn’t get to go with
them.

The morning before the group was planning to
leave, Jenka walked out to his best friend's farm to tell him
goodbye. Grondy’s hand was healing nicely, but his father needed
him on the farm. They had gotten a contract to grow hay and corn
for some ranchers down in Three Forks. Grondy’s destiny, it turned
out, wasn’t with the King’s Rangers. It was behind an ox and a
thresher in one of the foothill’s golden valleys. Jenka didn’t want
to taunt his friend with what he would be missing, so he held back
with his description of the coming journey. Even so, Grondy
confessed that he wanted to go more than anything. It was a sad
parting, and Jenka spent a few long moments after he got down the
lane from the growing farm studying the trees and wiping the dust
from his eyes.

Later that afternoon, a group of King’s
Rangers came riding into Crag all bloody and raving about a kill.
“We got that dragon!” they bragged. “Felled him way back in Calf
Horn Valley.”

They had come to fetch Master Kember and
Lemmy, but when they stopped by Jenka’s hut to purchase some
healing potions from his mother, they drew Jenka into it too. He
was lucky that Master Kember waved him over and handed him the
reigns of the horse intended for Lemmy. Lemmy was nowhere to be
seen, and Jenka was too worried that the rangers had just killed
Jade to care about anything else. He mounted the offered animal and
followed Master Kember and the rangers out of Crag and up into the
hills. They rode until dark, then the rangers lit torches for them
to see by, and they rode some more. Jenka figured that they were
already deeper into the foothills than he had ever been before.

The group came out from under the sparse
trees and topped a ridge overlooking an open, starlit valley. Off
to one side of the open space, along what appeared to be a
washed-out stream bed, there was a cluster of softly glowing yellow
flowers. The petals were bigger than any Jenka had ever seen
before, almost as big as bed sheets. It would have been quite
beautiful had there not been the long, broken-winged body of a
small dragon lying sprawled across the earth nearby.

Jenka’s heart was thudding in his chest and
the lump in his throat was the size of a gourd melon. The dragon
was the right size to be Jade, but Jenka wasn’t close enough yet to
be able to tell for certain. As they drew nearer, the dragon's
scales began to shimmer a deep, greenish color. Jenka’s chest
clenched with sadness, but then Captain Brody stepped up out of
nowhere and quickly said, “Hurry! Close your eyes until after the
flash.”

“Whimzatta,” a faint girlish voice spoke
with a tongue-tangling inflection. Suddenly, a sphere of stark,
white light the size of a man’s head was hovering in the air a
dozen feet above the dragon’s twisted corpse. The air became full
of humming, popping static and took on the clean smell of the sky
right after a lightning storm. Several of the rangers shied away
from the orb as if it were contagious. The dainty, hooded figure
underneath the magical globe seemed to think that was funny.

This was the first time Jenka had ever seen
anyone use High Magic, and it was a little bit disconcerting. He
had never seen one of the secretive druids that the rangers
sometimes spoke of either. The Order of Dou supposedly had a
monastery or a temple somewhere deep in the mountains. Some folks
said they were elvish, but Jenka wasn’t sure he believed that. Due
to their common interest of the forest, the druids sometimes helped
the rangers, but they had no sworn allegiance to King Blanchard or
the kingdom.

Jenka cringed when he saw a pale,
tattoo-lined feminine face peering out from under the hood directly
at him. The druida’s gaze cut right through him, and he felt his
scalp tingling as if his hair were standing on end.

“Is that the one?” Master Kember asked. He
put his hand on Jenka’s shoulder, breaking the spell he had fallen
under. “It’s still got both of its eyes.”

Under the bright magical light, Jenka saw
that the dead dragon’s scales were the color of a deep,
blackish-blue bruise, not green. He knew instantly that it wasn’t
Jade. He was surprised at how relieved he felt. He hadn’t expected
to be so worried about a creature that he had only spoken to once.
Sure they had saved each other’s lives, but the truth of it was
they were supposed to be natural enemies. Nevertheless, he was glad
that it wasn’t his friend lying dead in the glade.

“Maybe I missed?” he shrugged. “It’s almost
black.”

The druida’s magical light suddenly
disappeared. In the momentary blindness everyone experienced while
their eyes adjusted to the darkness, she moved impossibly fast and
slid up close to Jenka’s side.

“Liar,” she almost purred the word into his
ear, causing his blood to tingle with both fear and arousal at the
same time. Her breath smelled of cinnamon and ginger, and she
radiated a soft inviting heat like a woodstove.

“Master Kember, I would like a word with our
young troll-slayer if you please.” She gave a respectful head bow
to punctuate her request.

Master Kember’s expression showed the unease
he felt at being this close to the eerie -- yet exotically
beautiful -- tattooed girl. On the islands, and in Port and
Mainsted, the practice of the arcane was more commonplace. There
were witches and charm-makers on every corner, but out here in the
frontier it was rare - and sometimes shunned. Jenka’s mother used
magic of a sort, and he saw how people were afraid of her for it,
but it was nothing like the High Magic that this druida had just
been using. Master Kember gave Jenka’s shoulder a compassionate
squeeze and hurried away, leaving Jenka and the druida alone.

“It’s all right, Jenka De Swasso,” her voice
was sweet and liquid, and it dripped into Jenka’s ears and flowed
into him like honey. She looked surprisingly young; barely a woman.
She had four thin, blue-green lines running diagonally across the
bridge of her nose. There was an intricately-decorated circle on
her right cheek, a similar square on her left, and on her forehead
was a silvery triangle that pointed down at the tip of her nose,
giving her brow a permanently sinister look. A few tendrils of snow
white hair trailed out of her hood. Her eyes, though. Her eyes were
pools of sparkling lavender that were so deep a person could drown
in them.

“My name is Zahrellion, but you can call me
Zah,” she said. “Why did you lie about the dragon?”

Jenka was answering before he could stop
himself. “Because Jade saved me from a certain death at the hands
of the trolls. I can never forget that.”

“Jade? You know its name? You spoke with
this wyrm?”

“Yes I did, and I don’t care if you believe
me or not. Just don’t tell … ”

She cut him off. “Oh, I believe you, Jenka.”
Her eyes grew wide with a girlish excitement that she deftly
quelled the second the emotion showed. Looking around to make sure
no one was listening in on their conversation, she hooked her arm
in Jenka’s and led him away from the dragon carcass. “I’ve talked
to a dragon too, way up in the icy peaks. They choose to aid people
every now and then when things come to a head. A time like that is
at hand. Crystal told me that something evil has awakened in the
hills. Most likely, you and Jade will meet again.” Her brows
narrowed as the direction of the conversation took a sour turn. “We
have a common enemy, dragons and men. The trolls don’t like the
humans, and we are spreading and populating the frontier like field
mice. King Blanchard won’t make the move, but he has planned it all
out for his son. When Prince Richard takes the throne, the kingdom
seat will shift to Mainsted, here on the mainland, and once that
happens, there will be no hope for the trollkin.”

The word trollkin was a slang term that
included the little, gray-skinned goblins, the larger,
black-skinned orc, and of course the trolls themselves. After
hearing Jade call the trolls trellkin, he decided that maybe it
wasn’t a slang term after all. Ogres, Jenka had deduced, were
another sort of creature altogether.

“They are starting to figure this out,”
Zahrellion continued. “Already they’ve been forced into the higher
reaches where the ogres and dragons reign. Soon there will be
nowhere left for them to go. The dragons, on the other hand, can
always nest out of man's reach. Only a very few of the most foolish
wyrms get their selves killed, those are usually the mudged, like
this one. There are hundreds of dragons in the deep of the
mountains, Jenka. Some of the wyrm are older than you can
imagine.”