Dragon Master (20 page)

“That’s right. Because I visualized the victory.” We laughed.

Daija stopped laughing and looked like she was thinking something through. “How many times have you or Boe defeated Bayrd?”

I just smiled at her and didn’t respond. Of course neither of us had ever beaten Bayrd, but she didn’t need to know that.

I spurred my mount to catch up with the rest of the group, and Daija went racing past me. I tried to get my horse to keep up, but he refused to go any faster.

Bayrd carried a grudging respect for Daija once she’d proven herself in battle. And Gable acted like he was unimpressed, but I knew he had never defeated Bayrd in a duel either, so he surely knew better than to press the issue too much. I was sure he regretted appointing me as leader, but there was nothing that anyone could do about that now. Boe spent the first day brooding silently, refusing to speak to either me or Daija. I felt bad that he was taking this so hard. I tried to see the situation through his eyes, but I had trouble seeing why he was so upset. He seemed to like having his sister around at the festival, and he’d never actually objected to the possibility of Daija and I being together. Hadn’t it basically been his idea in the first place? I finally realized that he was actually worried about his sister being taken into battle with a dragon. It had been so long since the report of the Dragonbirth, and we were still so far away. It wasn’t like we’d actually have to fight him. Right?

When we reached the Great River in the middle of the next day, I thought Boe had made a mistake and steered us too far north, to the ocean. There was no sign of land across the water in any direction. People had gathered at the pier, many of them with carriages and supply carts along with mules and horses, and I had to admit that we were probably in Lorrence. We rode to a small building where a cranky young girl about my age took payment for the crossing, and then we waited.

Boe and I shared nervous looks. Neither of us wanted to bring up our worries about traveling over the water in front of everyone else. The horses sensed our anxiousness and stomped about restlessly, so we focused on trying to calm them.

At last the ferry came, and it was far larger than I had expected. And far more crowded. There were hundreds of people, dozens of carriages, and even whole flocks of animals crowded onto its long flat deck. They were fleeing across the Great River, either unaware that a Dragonbirth had already occurred on this side of it, or else feeling safer knowing that the female dragon was at the far eastern end of the Realm. It didn’t help my anxiety, seeing all these people coming from the direction we were headed. That was the way of a dragon quest though. I watched Daija’s face for any reaction to the ferry, but she just seemed impatient to board and cross the Great River.

***

“Why don’t you make Bayrd the flag bearer?” Gable complained to me as we were crossing. I’d given him the duty when we’d left Rægena, but I had to keep reminding him to fly the flag as we rode. I let him prop the flag against a protruding plank on the deck once I found how long the ferry ride would be, but he was clearly not looking forward to days or weeks of further flag duty.

“You’re doing a good job,” I said, simply, and dropped the subject. I was trying to focus on maintaining my balance. The world wasn’t supposed to shift and move underfoot like it kept doing.

He wasn’t done talking, now that he had me alone. “He likes her, you know.” We looked over at Bayrd waving his arms around, telling Daija some story.

“You’re saying I should be worried?” I tried to add a laugh to my voice as I said this, but it didn’t come out right.

“I’m saying it was a mistake for you to bring her. I’m saying you should watch Bayrd. And maybe force him to carry this flag pole all the time.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, thanks,” I said, and I walked off to join Daija.

“That’s too funny,” Daija was saying to Bayrd when I got within earshot. They both looked at me and started laughing.

“What’s funny?”

“The dragon heart,” she said, unable to contain her amusement. “You really fell backward?”

“You realize that dragon blood can paralyze you, right?” I asked her. Boe knew all this stuff, didn’t she know about it all too?

“Well, sure,” she said, uncertainly, “but it wasn’t a real dragon heart.”

“No,” I started, but she and Bayrd were laughing again and couldn’t hear me.

I looked out over the railing at the water swimming beneath us, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Between pangs of jealousy and the twisting in my stomach when I’d looked overboard I felt like I was that dragon with Master Coville inside of me. Tearing apart my insides.

I spent the rest of the ride below decks, near the head.

We made good time riding along the northeastern coast. There were small villages peppered all up and down the water with some major port towns, though none as impressive as Marstyn. We didn’t stop in any of them, but just from passing by I could tell that they seemed emptier and quieter the further up the coast we traveled. There was no indication that the dragon had yet been dealt with, and nobody wanted to be near a dragon. Nobody except Bayrd and Daija who couldn’t stop talking about how eager they were to catch up with him.

“He may already be dead,” I warned Daija as we rode.

“Can’t we go any faster?” She asked.

“There’s no reason to think that we’re too late,” Bayrd reassured her. Ever since the ferry ride, I couldn’t have a conversation with Daija without Bayrd butting in.

“That’s right,” I agreed, “I’m just saying you don’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Get my hopes up? I just want to know if the dragon’s alive, and to go kill him if he is,” Daija said.

“That’s what we all want,” Bayrd said. “That’s the whole point of a dragon quest.”

“I still can’t believe I’m on a dragon quest,” Daija said.

“Me neither,” Gable said, riding close enough to get in on the conversation. We ignored him.

“The dragon quest may be over,” Boe said, riding toward us.

I looked ahead and I saw what he had spotted first: a small party riding toward us with their dragon quest banner held high. They were kicking up a great deal of dust, but I could easily make out the rich purple colors of Cresence.

“What do you mean it may be over?” Daija sounded absolutely dejected.

“There’s a dragon quest riding the wrong way. Could be that the dragon’s dead after all. We’ll see what they have to say,” I explained.

We slowed to speak with the other group, and my heart sunk as they approached. I’d hoped that Boe was right, that the dragon was dead and the dragon quest was over. Things weren’t exactly going as I’d hoped they would go, and with every hour I was growing more anxious that the dragon may actually be alive, that I may actually be leading Daija right to him. I’d allowed myself to believe that these riders would include a Dragon Master, returning home after slaying the dragon, but I could see now that there were only two riders with three riderless horses trailing behind. I rode ahead of Gable and greeted the group.

“Hail,” said one of the riders. He looked to be five years older than me.

“Is the dragon slain?” I asked, getting right to the point.

The Stone Soul who’d addressed me answered, “Not by us.” Damn. Unspoken in the rider’s reply was that they’d obviously seen combat with the dragon, and had lost three of their team. “When we fled, we met with the Dragon Master from Sandclaw, though.” Still reason for hope, then.

“Best to make sure he got the job done,” said the other rider. He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and I saw belatedly that he was wearing a bandage over both his eyes.

“Thanks for the information,” I told them. “And sorry for your losses.”

“Good luck,” answered the bandaged rider.

We continued riding in opposite directions.

It wasn’t long before we found the beginning of the path of destruction. We had to peel off the coast and ride inland toward Stone Lake, but the locals were happy to point us in the right direction. They were thrilled to see more dragon quests appearing. And why wouldn’t they be? They had heard the reports about the Sandclaw Dragon Master, but it never hurt to have more reinforcements arriving in case the dragon defeated the Master. I did notice a couple of the locals here giving Daija disapproving looks, but nobody said anything about her being with us. Daija seemed content to just stare back at them in that way she had until they looked elsewhere. I wished I could have some time alone with her to just talk. I kept hoping to find out that the dragon was slain. Maybe we could take our time returning her to Chialaa Valley on our way back to Rægena. Instead, we were still on the dragon quest, and we were closer to a real dragon than ever before.

Surprisingly, the first village we approached looked and felt exactly like that first village we’d encountered in our false dragon quest. The dragon impostors had obviously done their homework because even the way the ground was scorched and the stone melted was identical to what we’d seen in those first villages before we’d stopped thoroughly examining each site. Even the smell was the same. It was something that I hadn’t clearly identified before but now that I was smelling it again it seemed unmistakable. The smell of dragon. It was worse than the smell of swamplands. There were no survivors milling around that I could see, but there were a kind of tourist. People who lived nearby in towns and villages that hadn’t been struck by the dragon, coming to see what had happened, to look at the destruction and pray for their good fortune that it hadn’t happened to them. Some of these people had formed a trail continuing on to the next point along the path of destruction, and we followed the trail in our continued pursuit.

***

Camp had been a fairly quick and efficient procedure for us until that night, but we had had to break off our set-up attempts earlier in the evening when we kept getting interrupted by gawkers and onlookers and curious kids with hundreds of questions. So we’d relocated to a more remote area away from the lake, but the terrain had been unfriendly and it had been twice as much work to get our tents in place and to get a proper fire set up. It was fully night before we were able to begin preparing supper and everyone was feeling grumpy from the delays, especially Gable.

“You two are nothing alike,” Gable pointed out to Boe and Daija as we finally settled in to eat our supper.

“Well, what do you want?” Boe asked.

“You’re supposed to be twins,” Gable said.

“I’m getting some sleep,” Bayrd announced. He stepped over Gable and then disappeared into his tent, carrying his steaming bowl of reheated beef and onions with him.

Gable had first watch tonight, and he seemed intent on provoking the rest of us to stay up as late with him as he could manage. “I know twins,” he said, this time to Daija, “and you’re not like twins.”

I was curious about this, too. Before I met Boe I thought all twins were either both boys or both girls, but never a brother and a sister. And the twins I’d known back home were exactly alike, but Boe and Daija looked very different in some ways.

“There are different kinds of twins,” Daija told him, clearly done with the subject.

Boe didn’t catch the dismissive tone in her voice, or didn’t care. “Yeah, we’re twins, not identical twins. Both kinds exist, you know.”

“Yeah,” I agreed even though I didn’t know anything about it. I just wanted to eat quickly and get to bed myself.

“No,” Gable protested, leaning forward accusingly toward Boe, “I know twins who aren’t identical. Marja and Marin at the fair were twins, and they’re brother and sister, but they’re still plenty alike.”

“Lay off,” I said. It wasn’t an order from a dragon quest leader, it was just me, defending my friends.

“You’re stupid,” Daija said to Gable, then left us and disappeared into her tent with her food.

The tents were small, individual sized, but we’d only brought four with us and so two of us had to share. I supposed that as dragon quest leader I could force Gable and Bayrd to share, but I didn’t want to give Gable any more to complain about. And while I briefly considered suggesting that Daija and I share a tent, it wasn’t something I felt I should attempt without speaking privately with Daija about it first. And we still hadn’t had any kind of private conversation since the day she joined us. In the end, Boe and I ended up bunking together again, though we barely fit in our shared tent and it was so uncomfortable that I hadn’t been getting proper sleep most nights. Tonight I had second watch, and I was planning to skip the tent altogether and get some sleep outside by the fire until Gable woke me for my turn.

We finished our food without saying anything more about the subject of twins. Still, Gable wasn’t quite ready to drop it. “So why are you pretending to be twins?” he asked Boe after I’d laid back and closed my eyes.

“Daija’s right,” Boe told him, “you’re stupid.”

I peeked through my eyelids at them in time to see Gable’s eyes flash in anger. The flickering light of the waning campfire caused deep shadows to run across his face, adding a sinister edge.

“I’m going to figure out what you’re hiding,” Gable promised.

“Why don’t you figure out how to build a proper campfire first,” I suggested, shivering.

Boe stood up to leave, but Gable also stood up and grabbed his wrist, holding him in place.

“You’re an impostor too, aren’t you? I don’t believe it! First Warley and now you.”

Boe stood silently with his back to Gable, and shook his wrist free.

“We already dealt with the only impostor on the team,” I said coldly, rising to my feet. I felt the emptiness at my back where my scabbard normally hung and I wished I had my sword. Just in case.

“You know the penalty for covering for him,” Gable said to me, the stone in his voice making the warning clear. “Or are you hoping I’ll find my proof and turn you in before we catch up with the dragon? You want to turn back now and go live a servant’s life with your girlfriend?”

“There’s no proof to be found, Gable,” Boe said, finally. He stalked off to our tent and added, “You’re insane and delusional.”