The Wizard And The Dragon (31 page)

I
started this book during the nights when we rested. After I fulfill my promise
and help carry the parts back to Kate’s home, I will be returning to the tower
to hand this book to you. Of course, Bryce, you already know this since you
have the book in your hands. I still haven’t decided if I will speak with you
when I arrive. If I do, I hope you understood why I had to leave you alone. If
I don’t, then I hope you will read this again until you understand what has
happened to us both.

There
was no great feeling of relief when the dragon died. I am proud to have put to
rest what killed our parents but the cost was too great. Candle is still alive
for you now, and for once the cycle of our lives has ended with success instead
of death. Decisions that I thought were set in stone could have been different,
and your missing finger is proof enough of that.

Stay
in the tower, Bryce. Teach yourself and wait for the day that the room in the
study will open. Look after the boy as I looked after you, and then go your own
way when that debt has been paid. Your Candle can live and you can avoid the
dragon.

You
can choose to live another way.

Author’s
Note:

Thank you for
reading The Wizard and the Dragon. I hope you enjoyed it.

On the next
page I have included another story set in the same fantasy universe as this
novel. It is the beginning of a series of novellas that follows Kate, a character
introduced toward the end of this novel. It is set two years prior to her
meeting with Bryce and will eventually catch up to when this novel takes place.

Once again,
thank you for taking the time to read the book.

The Monster Slayer:
Origins.

The
memories bled as they died. They bled together, out of her, leaving as images
in front of her eyes. They offered a final, fleeting glimpse as they faded into
not darkness but nothing at all.

Her thoughts manifested around her as
they were stripped away. She was caught in the middle of them while they
churned around her, turning and turning like a gyre that threatened to sweep
her up. Monsters and nightmares, unwilling to reveal which was which, blended
with untarnished memories like they were being mixed together in a cauldron.
Friendly recollections became hostile. Moments when she fought for her life
became affectionate and warm.

There were monsters in the room around
her. Trolls and ogres, vampires and necromancers, shadows hiding shadows before
they stepped into the light and were obliterated, washed away by the current
around her. She fought a vampire three times, two times, once, then not at all.
He had a name. It had a name. All gone, that shimmering memory of triumph and
victory, lost along with all the mundane days void of struggle.

The years emptied out of her, too fast
to realize how many were leaving. Twenty? Hundreds? Thousands? She knew that
she could be taken away with them, washed away in the current that unraveled
out of her and then, suddenly, she knew that was what she wanted. She was gone
then, hollowed and left staring at the fire that had burned away her lives.
Still seeing the fire as it finished burning her away. Still seeing the fire.

Seeing the fire.

The fire.

Fire.

There was a candle next to the bed.
There was a fireplace behind it. Her eyes focused on the larger fire and then
the smaller flame on top of the candle. Another cycle: her eyes adjusting
between the foreground and the background of her vision, blurry and then clear.
She was awake, abruptly but gently, staring at the fire. She felt the bed
underneath her and had no idea how long she had been laying in it.

She looked around the room with only her
eyes, not moving her head. The room was small. No windows. The only light was
from the candle and fireplace. There was a single cabinet and a small table
next to her bed. There was a book and a candle on top of it. She sat upright
and expected the room to spin around her, to feel pain like she had recently
suffered a blow to the head. When she felt fine, she only grew more suspicious.
The floor was warm beneath her bare feet and she stood up.

She stepped quietly around the room.
There was only one door and it was closed. There was a piece of parchment
impaled on it with a knife. She turned from it and put her hands on the walls.
She crouched down in front of the fireplace and peered through it. There was
another room on the other side. She turned her head and saw two other openings.
The chimney was a column in the middle of at least four other rooms. She stood
then, dumbfounded by her own actions. The parchment on the door. She pulled on
it, tearing it away from the knife, and looked over it. Someone had written on
it.

Your name is Kate,
the note began. There was a date at the top.

You live alone. You are standing in your
house. You are in a forest close to a town called Harkam’s Bridge. You are known
there as Kate. Just Kate, no last name. I hated when people called me Kathleen
but you might like it. Remember, though, that those who know you think you hate
it.

You have been poisoned. That is why you
cannot remember anything. The poisoner, however, is yourself. You prepared the
poison yourself, and then you decided to drink it. You have done this many
times before, more times than you and I will ever know. You will learn why it
is necessary with time, but it will be from studying the notes left from your
past and not by remembering it yourself. Know this, now and forever, that the
poison was permanent. You will never remember what you have forgotten.

You are far older and far stronger than
you appear. I do not know when we, you, I, began, but I know that we found a
way to extend our life far beyond natural means, perhaps even indefinitely. You
have been many different people and have learned many different things during
those lives. Unfortunately, though the body and mind can be prolonged, they
both have their limits. Your muscles can only be so dense and strengthened, and
so your mind can only hold so much. Your memories are like a book, and although
we have stitched in as many new pages into its spine as we can, that spine is
finite. When all the pages are full, an older one must be rewritten to accommodate
the new and then, unfortunately, the book must be rebound.

The poison is imperfect, or the mind is
more vulnerable than we understand. Your memories have been plucked away but
so, too, have your capabilities. It is always a gamble and it is never certain
what will survive. The worst case would be that you cannot even read these
words. When it was I that woke up, I had forgotten how to use a blade but had
remembered the bow. I could still work metal and stone and built the house you
stand in, over many years, but had to relearn how to ride a horse. I could skin
an animal and tan its hide but did not know how to thread a needle.

That is all I can say. We are careful
and methodical; remain so to not be overwhelmed. You have friends in town. I
have listed them below.

There was a space before the writing
continued. The list was at the bottom of the parchment but, between it and the
note, was a single line. The words were in the same hand as the rest but looked
like they were written hastily. The lines were rough and scrawled where the
others were neat.

Do not trust Calder.

The list was full of names and the locations
of homes. A horse was listed as hers, stabled in town. She rolled the parchment
up and put her hand on the door. She listened carefully as she opened it,
leaning into the new room before stepping inside of it. The room was much
larger than the first. There was no one inside and it was then that the details
pressed at her. At each new thing she looked it was like the knowledge of each
item was taking a place inside of her head:

A window directly to the left. Dark out.
Late evening. Trees outside. The faint rushing of water from its direction. Desks
against the outer wall. Quills and bottles of ink, mostly black but some reds
and blues. Bookcases next to the table. Another door, closed, and more shelves
next to it. The fireplace was visible to the right, another side of the stone
column that was seen in the bedroom. A chandelier in the middle of the room—a
simple, modest metal frame with four unlit candles. The room was a study.

She put a hand to her head as the
information rushed through her, similar to the sensation of a loud noise too
close to her ears. Something about the chandelier nagged at her but then so did
the rest of the room. The parchment, the ink, and the quills. The thought came
to her and she moved while still holding her head. She dripped ink over the
table as she held the quill in her right hand. The parchment had other words on
it but she ignored them, hovering her hand over it and finding that she didn’t
know how to write.

The idea of writing seemed simple and
easy. Draw the lines with your hand. The ink dripped onto the parchment and
seeped into it, thick in the middle and veiny on the outside. Recreating the
lines seemed impossible; they were too intricate and smooth. Each curved line
came out elongated and mutated from the original form. She closed her eyes and
tried to lose her concentration. She hadn’t thought about walking or reading,
she had just done it.

Kate.

Her hand moved so quickly that she was
sure the result would have been one continuous scribble; however, her name was
there, Kate, a perfect copy of the note she had read. She wrote it thrice more
and then the first line. She put the words side by side and nodded once. The
handwriting was the same. The note was indeed written by her but that didn’t
mean it wasn’t done so under duress. She dropped the quill and stepped away
from the table.

“Kate,” she said out loud and reeled at
the sound of her own voice. It felt loud in the room around her, with only the
crisp crackling of the fire and the gentle roar of water from the window. Kate
moved slowly to the fireplace and crouched again, peering through the flames at
the other room directly across from her. She listened. No footsteps responded
to her voice. It was difficult to recognize anything through the fire.

She opened the new door and stepped back
from it, looking into the room. It was the smallest one yet and also the coldest.
There were no candles and the only light came from the fire behind her, pressing
her shadow through the doorway. There was a door to her left that she guessed
led outside. Another door to the right. There were boots on the floor and an
assortment of coats hanging on the wall. She stepped quickly to the right door,
wincing at how cold the floor was under her bare feet.

The next room brought another wave of
details and she felt her mind cataloguing each of them, as if her memory was
working without her consent:

The room was the same size as the study.
There was a counter on either side of her and a large table on the farthest
wall. The fireplace was to her right—she was in the room she had seen through
the bedroom. Buckets of water on the counter. Food. Salted meat. Fruit. Vegetables.
Apples, pears, potatoes, carrots, turnip, and grain. Bowls and cups. Another
fireplace on the wall to the left? No, a cooking hearth, wide and open with its
own chimney above it and empty pots on the floor around it. A kitchen.

She grabbed her head with both hands.
The image of the chandelier came crashing back to her as she thought about the
extra fireplace when the center one could have served equally well. When the
disorientation passed, she stepped to the right wall and studied the stone
carefully. There were hooks hammered deeply into the stone but the column was
thick and wide, so much that she was certain the hooks didn’t break through the
inner chimney. There were other pots and pans hanging on the hooks but the
opening was too low to use for cooking. She didn’t understand.

The dining area was on the far side of
the room and there was more food on the table. She felt like a list was being
calculated and checked as she scanned the table top. More food. She took an
apple and bit into it and then immediately spat it out. The taste was
disgusting and she looked down at the fruit expecting it to be rotten. The
flesh of it was ripe and juicy, still appetizing to her eyes but the sour taste
felt like an unwanted invader on her tongue. Did she keep apples when she
didn’t like them? For guests? Or was it a change, a result of the poison? There
were many apples on the table. She frowned.

There was another door that led to what
she suddenly knew was the final room. She hadn’t remembered but rather judged
the dimensions of the house based on how the walls had been. She would have
been impressed with herself if she wasn’t set on guard as she put her hand on
the door handle. The last room would be the only place another person could be.
She pushed open the door prepared for a fight and, to her surprise, she was
deeply calm about that possibility.

The last room was directly opposite the
study. The only light came from the opening to the central fireplace. The room
was packed with items and tools and their shadows were layered and cast over
one another. There was no other person that she could see hiding in the room,
but it wasn’t until she stepped inside and was certain that she found herself
surveying the items properly. It looked like a workshop.

There were five wooden frames against
the outer wall. Two of them were empty, while the other three had animal skins
stretched over and pinned into the wood. Sheepskin, she somehow knew, along
with the method to prepare them into parchment. There were more hides on the
floor that she didn’t recognize. Tools, knives, mallets, swords, and a pile of
leather armor. There were scattered blotches of blood on the floor next to
small, tidy piles of sawdust. Firewood was neatly stacked between the farthest
wall and the fireplace. A horsehair broom rested in a corner next to another
door that led outside. The window next to it still showed that it was late
evening. She turned and walked back where she came from.

Kate closed each door behind her until
she was back in the study. She pulled out books at random from the shelves and
leafed through them. Almost all of them were in her own handwriting. Some were
even illustrated and she gawked at the detail, simultaneously hoping she was
responsible out of pride, and hoping she wasn’t so she didn’t dare have to live
up to that standard. There were pictures of monsters and animals, with
different body parts in excruciating detail. Teeth, fangs, and organs. She
stopped on a section and shuddered at the drawing: a beautiful human girl and
then the same girl a monster, her mouth caked in blood. A vampire, she read,
and had not the faintest idea about what a vampire could be.

She closed the book and moved onto
others. She found nothing detailing the poison that she had supposedly
administered to herself. Then, the thought was gone as she took a book down
from a new shelf. She opened it up and saw the same handwriting detailing days
and events. The intention of keeping a record was stated often. She flipped
through the pages quickly. There was a series of numbers at the top of each
entry. She remembered the concept of days and dates but had no point of
reference to determine the age of each entry.