Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

He picked a coin off the dragon’s back to show his father and said, “Stay quiet. No one should disturb you. I’ll come back for you soon.”

On the top of the cliff, he glanced back. The dragon had curled tightly around itself, tucking head and claws and tail close into its body. Its visible eye had closed. Thayne began the long journey to the southern horn of Ysse.

He reached the ancient, crumbling castle at night, running a boat he had borrowed in on the tide. He pulled it to shore and stood silently a moment. He could feel the dragon sleeping, a massive, shadowy power in the dark, like a dreaming mountain full of caverns, secret underground rivers, deeper veins of molten fire rooted in the heart of the world. Then he heard soft, uneven steps, the rhythmic beat of something hard against the ground between the steps. A figure appeared in the open gate, swung the crutch for another step, and stopped dead.

Craiche whispered, “I can see your eyes in the dark.”

Thayne went to him, held him tightly, wordlessly. He had journeyed so far from the man who had left Ysse with the dragon only a picture in his mind, that he thought not even Craiche would recognize him. He said, “I brought the dragon.”

Craiche shook his head a little, letting the crutch fall to cling to Thayne with both hands. “You are the dragon.” His voice shook. “Did it—was it hard?”

“It seemed impossible.” He loosed his brother, picked up the crutch. “I had to fight the battle between Yves and the North Islands all over again.”

“Did you win?”

“Yes.” He dropped his arm loosely over Craiche’s shoulders as he balanced himself again. “There was a knight of Gloinmere who came to Skye at the same time, looking for that tower. We fought—”

“Did you kill him?”

“Nearly.” He was silent a moment, remembering the eerie, desperate battle among the bones and gold. “But he told me something only he could have known to be true. That he was the man who carried you down the hill in the dark when you were wounded.”

He heard Craiche’s breath catch; the crutch struck earth and stopped again. “Who was he?” All the pain of the memory that Craiche kept so well hidden behind his smile surfaced suddenly, knotted in the words.

“Cyan Dag. The man who was busy, at the same time, saving Regis Aurum’s life.”

“Why did he—” Craiche stopped, swallowing bitterness. “Why did he bother with me?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to ask him that. Maybe, if he survives the war we will bring to Gloinmere, you can ask him yourself.”

Craiche was silent, moving again across the courtyard. No one else was awake; even the tower their father loved was dark. As they passed it, Thayne felt something other than dragon thought flare like an ember in his mind: an emanation of power within the ancient books.

He breathed, surprised. “So he is right about that, too.”

“What?”

“Our father. He never bothered with books when he could think. Now he can smell the power in them. How is he? Did he realize I was gone?”

“Well.” Craiche’s voice eased; Thayne felt his smile flash before he saw it, in the torchlight at the steps. “He got it through his head well enough that Thayne had gone to get the dragon. But he couldn’t connect Thayne the dragon hunter with the man who led him out of the tower at night and brought him supper. He kept wondering where that man was. So yes, he missed you.”

“One of me,” Thayne said wryly.

“Where did you put the dragon?”

“On the north horn of the island.”

“And the gold? Did you bring that, too?”

“Gold enough for us all to fill our plates with it and eat it for a year. Gold—you won’t believe what you see.”

“We should hide the gold. Ships out of Yves sail among the islands sometimes.”

“No one,” Thayne said grimly, “would touch that dragon’s gold and live.”

“Take me to see it.”

“I will. In the morning.”

When they woke in the morning, the dragon was in the yard.

Thayne was pulled out of a dream of some dark, bleak, dangerous place in which someone he could not see had just said something profound and vital that he did not quite understand. He reached for what he thought was his sword and stumbled out of bed before he opened his eyes. He bumped into his father in the hallway, barefoot and brandishing a sword.

“We are besieged,” he shouted at Thayne. The scantily bearded young man who milked and herded the cows ducked nervously behind a door. Thayne heard the shouts from the yard, the impatient bawling of cows.

“There’s a great thing in the yard, my lord,” the cow man said to Thayne. “I couldn’t get to the barns.”

“Arm the house!”

“It’s your dragon,” Thayne told his father. “The one you sent me to get in Skye.” His father stared at him.

“Bowan? You’re back home.”

“I came back last night. You were sleeping.”

“Your eyes are strange. Are you dead?”

Thayne rubbed them, swallowing a bitter laugh. “If I were Bowan, I’d be dead. I’m Thayne. Your son.”

“Oh.”

He dropped a hand on his father’s shoulder, feeling the cold that had seeped beneath the dragon’s scales and disturbed its sleep. “Come and see it.”

“Bowan.”

“Thayne.”

“Why are you carrying that?”

Thayne felt it, then: the smooth grain in his hand instead of metal, the lighter weight of aged wood. Some sort of staff, he held, with a knotted bole on one end worn smooth as a skull. “Must be something of Craiche’s,” he guessed, bemused. “I thought I had picked up my sword.”

“It looked at me,” his father said, gazing mesmerized at the bole. The shouts from the yard grew in force, as the household awoke; dogs had begun to howl. Thayne heard Craiche’s voice in the din, trying to quiet the dogs.

An ember flared in the dragon’s brain: impatience, annoyance at the noise, the cold, the chaos of smells, the unpredictable world so unlike the stillness of the burning waste. Thayne moved quickly, still carrying the staff like a shepherd, the anxious members of the household flocking in his wake, as he went out.

The dragon had coiled itself into the yard like a sea creature in its shell, its bulky body spilling from house to barns, from wall to wall. Its head was raised; it peered curiously into the tower where Thayne’s father played with magic. The gates were completely blocked by a wing. Dogs on the steps barked furiously at its other wing, then slunk back, whining at the smell of sulfur. The treasure on the dragon’s back, clinging like a crust of sea life on a rock, hurt the eyes like the rising sun.

Craiche was standing among the gold, his face butter yellow in its glow. He lifted a golden helm, tried to fit it over his head, then shook the skull out of it, laughing. He dropped it into place. An etched and hammered mask of gold swung toward Thayne, its eyes dark slits in the gold, its mouth a thin, grim line.

Thayne wondered suddenly what it would take to persuade Craiche to stay home from this war. He did not broach the subject then, just said quickly, “Craiche, get down. It’s a wild, dangerous thing and it could crush you if you fall.”

“It’s beautiful,” Craiche said breathlessly from within the helm. “It will do what you tell it. Let me fly it with you. You have to move it out of the yard. And you can’t expect me to march all the way to Gloinmere.”

A wing shifted, perhaps harried by a dog, perhaps to unfurl for flight. Thayne gripped the staff in his hand tightly. “Craiche,” he began, then did not bother. The dragon’s neck sprawled over most of the stone steps in front of the doors. Thayne walked onto it easily, down its broad, flattened back. The dragon, one eye still studying the disorderly contents of the room at the top of the tower, rolled its other eye down at Thayne. It snorted very gently; the acrid smell of damp ash blew through the yard.