Patricia McKillip - The Tower at Stony Wood

“I know.”

“Then why?”

Thayne looked at him silently, feeling himself, with all his power, balanced on the thin edge of a blade, halfway between all he wanted and what he most feared. He said, “Don’t fight me over this. You’re with me now because you are the measure of what I win or lose in Gloinmere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want you to understand.” His fingers dug fiercely into Craiche’s shoulder. “I never want you to understand. All I want you to do is stay alive.”

He saw himself suddenly out of Craiche’s eyes, in an odd merging of their sight: a honed, powerful figure, the dragon fire flaring and ebbing in his eyes, and all the ancient forces of Ysse in his mind, the first Lord of Ysse in a thousand years who could take all he wanted from the world, but for something even more powerful that restrained him.

“Who,” Craiche whispered, “made you promise?” They had left the sea behind by then; land, green with summer, flowed in its own frozen waves and hollows beneath them. Thayne’s hand loosened, hovered for an instant near Craiche’s face, which was turning hourly, it seemed, into the feral, graceful, impetuous ghost of their father’s. He shook his head, again without answering. “Just stop warring with me. I am the Lord of Ysse and you are my crippled younger brother who would be walking on two legs instead of three now if you had listened instead of fighting seven years ago. Let me do what I will.”

They reached Gloinmere near dusk, a day later. Thayne stripped the cocoon of invisibility from the dragon as it settled in the yard. The whole of the castle on Ysse could have fit in the yard at Gloinmere, but not even the high walls and towers could dwarf the dragon, who peered into window and turret at whim. It snorted at the astonished guards running along the walls; they tumbled back into one another, arrows and crossbows flying like straw in a storm. Thayne heard an uproar from within as the dragon laid its smoldering eye against a window in the hall. The doors flew open; guards and knights, brandishing sword and pike and bow, started down the steps. Thayne raised the staff in his hand, sent a tidal wave of cold fire that swept into them, battered them off their feet, and sent them sliding helplessly back into the hall. The fire died; Thayne waited. A few unarmed men came out, quickly pulled those fallen and washed against the walls back into the hall. The doors slammed shut again. The dragon, raising its long neck higher than the highest tower, opened its jaws and loosed a butterfly of flame that turned the pennants flying there into cinders.

The guards at the gates had vanished into their turrets. Along the walls, a helmed head appeared briefly here and there, then ducked back down again. Someone, not thinking too clearly, shot a burning arrow over the wall. The dragon, moving so quickly it startled even Thayne, picked the arrow out of the air like a frog snatching a fly, and swallowed it. A little flame drifted out of its teeth. It dropped its head over the high wall, and what was left of the guard fled into the towers.

Thayne raised his voice. “Regis Aurum!” The bells in the high tower hummed. Craiche, his face puckered, dropped to his knees and put his hands over his ears. From within the hall came an answering volley of exploding crockery. “The North Islands have come to Gloinmere with their tribute to the King of Yves.”

The doors swung open again. The King of Yves strode out furiously, alone, his broadsword in one hand. He stopped abruptly, the expression on his face changing as he raised his head and kept raising it, until he finally found the dragon’s eyes, each one as broad as an open door, staring down at him. Thayne saw him swallow. He looked at Thayne then, seeing him instead of the vague, pinched, impoverished face that every man from the North Islands wore in his eyes.

He drew breath. “Thayne Ysse. I’ve heard tales of power in the North Islands, but I thought that’s all they were. What do you want?”

“Justice.”

The king’s face hardened. “Then leave that monster outside my walls and come to me with courtesy. What will you do? Burn Gloinmere and call that justice?”

“It would be.” Thayne heard his own voice shake.

Still on his knees, Craiche whispered, “Don’t tell him—show him.”

“You in Gloinmere have eaten the North Islands to the bone for centuries. You pick at the carcass and demand more. If we had nothing but stones to eat, you would demand stones. You drive us to our knees, and slaughter us when we refuse to yield our lives to you. You want our oaths of fealty and tribute, but what of mercy or good faith or justice have you ever shown us? What have you ever given the North Islands but the back of your hand and the sole of your boot? Ysse, not Yves, ruled the North Islands once. Ysse, not Yves, will rule the North Islands now. You can give me the courtesy due from one ruler to another, and if you and your knights set one foot in the sea between us, to fight us for our freedom, I will shake the stones of Gloinmere down around your ears.”

The king took a step, his face streaked with rage. “Then do it now, because I will hunt you down as a traitor to Yves when you leave Gloinmere—”

Thayne heard metal slide from a sheath. Craiche pulled himself up, stood beside him, sword in one hand and gripping a wingbone with the other for balance. “Then I will kill you,” he said, his stripped, level voice sounding so much like their father’s that Thayne’s skin pricked.

He shifted, sending an undulation down the dragon’s back that made Craiche lose his balance. He vanished behind the wing again. Regis, his voice cracking, shouted, “Who was that?”

“The next ruler of Ysse,” Thayne said, and lost his temper. He raised the staff, the eye in the bole glittering at Regis Aurum, holding him motionless, transfixed, while Thayne poured what thoughts he had left into the bole until he could see Regis through all its power and its eye. “Enough,” he said very softly. “Come to me. Come.”

The gate opened behind him.

He turned abruptly, startled, the power in the staff flaring out of it at whoever had entered. He caught a horrifying glimpse of a woman standing helplessly in its luminous path. Then the light surged back at him, streaming into the staff with such force that he thought the gate had flown off its hinges and smacked into him. All his own power exploded from the staff into his mind.

He struggled out of that dazzling star, felt Craiche’s hands holding him, helping him up. He blinked his vision clear as he rose, and saw the king again, staring over the coiled neck of the dragon at the woman in the gate. Thayne could not find words; Regis Aurum managed.

“Who are you?”

“I’m the baker,” she said, “from Stony Wood.”

The dragon drew her eyes then, its luminous scales glowing in the fading light as with inner fires, its head reared on the immense stalk of its neck, staring down at Sel out of cauldrons of molten gold. It was absolutely still. So was she, stunned still, for she had never seen anything so beautiful or so menacing in her life. Its jaws opened slightly, revealing teeth like wedges of crystal, as if, she thought incredulously, it smiled.

It was more than dragon. That she recognized, though she could not have said where its boundaries of dragon ended, and the unknown force that knew her name began. Somewhere in its fiery, nebulous thoughts a familiar eye had opened, looked at her. The smoldering confusion of emotion from the humans in the yard pulled at her attention before she could pursue the question. She studied the men, remembering what Melanthos had told her.

The brown, burly man with the sword in his hand and the hectic blood in his face, standing alone on the steps defending his house, must be the King of Yves, the North Islands, and Skye. The gold-haired man whose powers had rebounded back at him would certainly be Thayne Ysse, who had brought the dragon to war with the king. The young man beside him, as dark as Thayne was fair, Melanthos hadn’t mentioned. He wore the same fearless, intractable expression as Thayne, and stood so close, his hand gripping Thayne’s arm, that Sel guessed he must be family.