Dragonfield: And Other Stories Read online

  A hand on her shoulder recalled her to the place. It was the fisherman’s son.

  “Gone then?” he asked. He meant the dragon.

  But knowing Lancot was gone as well, Tansy began sobbing anew. Neither her mother nor her sisters nor the priest nor all the celebrations that night in the town could salve her. She walked down to the water’s edge at dusk by herself and looked out over the sea to the spit of land where the ash mound that had been the dragon was black against the darkening sky.

  The gulls were still. From behind her a solitary owl called its place from tree to tree. A small breeze teased into the willows, setting them to rustling. Tansy heard a noise near her and shrugged further into herself. She would let no one pull her out of her misery, not her mother nor her sisters nor all the children of the town.

  “I could use a bit of hallow on my throwing hand,” came a voice.

  “Aloe,” she said automatically before she turned.

  “It’s awfully hard to kill a hero,” said Lancot with a smile.

  “But you can’t swim.”

  “It’s low tide,” he said. “And I can wade.”

  Tansy laughed.

  “It’s awfully hard to kill a hero,” so said Lancot. “But we ordinary fellows, we do get hurt. So I could use a bit of hallow on my hand.”

  She didn’t mind the smear of aloe on her hair and cheek. But that came later on, much later that night. And it seemed to the two of them that what they did then was very heroic indeed.

  There is a spit of land near the farthest shores of the farthest islands. It is known as Dragonfield. Once dragons dwelt on the isles in great herds, feeding on the dry bush and fueling their flames with the carcasses of small animals and migratory birds. There are no dragons there now, though the nearer islands are scored with long furrows as though giant claws had been at work, and the land is fertile from the bones of the buried behemoths. There is a large mount of ash-colored rock that appears and disappears in the ebb and flow of the tide. No birds land on that rock, and seals avoid it as well. The islanders call it Worm’s Head, and once a year they row out to it and sail a great kite from its highest point, a kite which they then set afire and let go into the prevailing winds. Some of the younger mothers complain that one day that kite will burn down a house and they have agitated to end the ceremony. But as long as the story of Tansy and the hero is told, the great kites will fly over the rock, of that I am sure.

  The Thirteenth Fey

  IN THE MIDDLE OF a stand of white birch on a slight rise is a decaying pavilion, inferior Palladian in style. The white pilasters have been pocked by generations of peashooters, and several kite strings, quite stained by the local birds, still twine around the capitols. The wind whistles through the thin walls, especially in late spring, and the rains—quite heavy in November and April—have made runnels in the paper. It is very old paper anyway. As a child I used to see different pictures there, an ever-changing march of fates. My parents once thought I had the sight until they realized it was only a vivid imagination supplemented by earaches and low grade fevers. I was quite frequently ill.

  I was born in that pavilion, on the marble and velvet couch my parents used for the lying-in for each of my twelve brothers and sisters and me. And I was hung on my baby board in the lower branches of the trees, watched over by butterflies; the mourning doves to sing me to sleep, a chorus of crows to wake me. It was not until I reached my thirteenth year that I understood what my dear mother and her mother before her knew and grieved for but could do nothing about. It was then that I discovered that we are tied to that small piece of land circling the pavilion, tied with bonds of magic as old and secure as common law. We owe our fortunes, our existence, and the lives of our children to come to the owners of that land. We are bounden to do them duty, we women of the fey. And during all the time of our habitation, the local lords have been a dynasty of idiots, fornicators, louts, greedyguts, and fools.

  As the last of thirteen children I was not expected to be of any special merit. It is the first and seventh whose cranial bones are read, whose palms are searched, whose first baby babblings are recorded. Yet I had been marked with a caul, had been early to walk, early to talk, early to fly. And then there were my vivid dreams, my visions brought on by ague and earache and the peculiar swirling patterns of moldy walls. I was, in my father’s words, “ever a surprise.”

  My father was a gentle soul. His elven ancestry showed only in his ears, which he was careful to hide beneath a fringe of graying hair, so as not to insult his wife’s innumerable relatives who dwelt nearby in their own decaying whimseys, reposes, and belvederes. They already believed my mother had married beneath her. But my father, though somewhat shy on magic, lived for his library, stocked with books of the past, present, and future. He was well read in Gramarye, but also in Astrology, Philosophy, and Computer Science, an art whose time was yet to come.

  My mother was never so gentle. She came from the Shouting Fey, those who could cause death and consternation by the timber of their voices. She had a sister who, on command, could bring down milk from dried-up cows with one voice, or gum it up with another. There was a great-aunt, about whom little else was said except that she could scream in six registers at once and had broken windows in all of the Western Counties as a child when bidden to do so by a silly prince one vivid day in spring.

  My sisters and brothers and I were a mix, of course, both gentle and loud. But I, the thirteenth fey, was supposed to be the gentlest and loudest of all.

  The events I am about to relate really began nine months before the princess was born. Her birth had been long awaited. The queen, a wart-ridden harridan, was thought barren. Years of royal marriage had produced nothing but promises. Yet one steaming hot day, so the queen said, she had gone bathing in a mountain stream with her young women. More for the sake of cooling than cleanliness, I imagine. Humans are, for the most part, a disgustingly filthy lot. And a frog had climbed upon her knee and prophesied a child.

  Now I have known many frogs in my time and though the peepers especially are a solipsistic tribe, believing they alone bring spring up from the edge of the world, frogs have no magical talents and they do not have the gift of prophecy. The queen was entirely wrong. It was not a frog at all. It might have been a Muryan. Tiny, dressed in green, one might be mistaken for a frog by a distraught, hot, and desperate queen. But Muryans are a mischievous lot and their natterings are never to be taken seriously.

  The queen had rushed home, trailed by her still dripping handmaidens, and told the king. He was well past believing her promises. But much to everyone’s surprise (except my father, who expressed the gentle judgment that, according to a law to be enacted years hence called Probability or Murphy’s—I forget just which—occasionally a Muryan prophecy might be accurate) the queen gave birth some nine months later to a girl.

  They named her Talia and invited—or rather insisted—all the local feys come and bring a gift. We who were so poor as to be forced to live on moonbeams, the free fare of the faery world, had to expend our small remaining store of magicks on that squawling, bawling human infant whose father owned a quarter million acres of land, six rivers, five mountains, and the tithing of all the farms from the Western Sea to the East. It was appalling and unfair and Mother cried about it for days. But Father cautioned her to keep her voice low and, as she knew he was right, she did.

  The family gathered to discuss the possibilities but I was sick again with a fever and so had no part in the family council. Who would have believed that a bout of ague brought on by dancing one starry night in a wet field should become so important to the fate of us all.

  Father portioned out the magicks at that meeting, one to each child and something for Mother and himself. But he forgot me, sick abed, and so left nothing but an old linden spindle, knotted about with the thread of long life, in the family trunk. The instruction sheet to it was in tatters, mouse-nibbled, shredded for nests. Besides, the spindle lay on the very bottom of the
trunk and was covered with a tatty Cloth of Invisibility that worked only occasionally and, as it happened to be one of those occasions, Father hadn’t even noticed it. Besides, having decided on gifts of beauty, riches, and wit—all appropriate and necessary gifts for that particular human princess—he wasn’t likely to think of giving a newborn the end of life spun out on a wooden distaff.

  So the family went to the christening without me, though Mother laid a cool cloth on my head, left a tisane in our best cup by my bed, and kissed both my cheeks before leaving.

  “Sleep well, little one,” she whispered. It was always special when she was careful to modulate her voice and I knew then how much she loved me. “Sleep well and long.”

  I expect her admonition forced itself into my fever dreams. I woke about an hour later, feeling surprisingly cool but parched. I had drunk up the tisane already and so cried out for some weak tea. When no one but the doves answered me with their soft coo-coo-co-roos from the rafters, I remembered where the family had gone.

  Rising from my sickbed, I slipped a silvery party dress on over my shift. The dress was well patched with spider webbing, but the stitches scarcely showed, especially in in moonlight.

  I looked in the glass. My hair seemed startled into place and I combed it down with my fingers, not feeling up to searching for my brush. Then I pinched my cheeks to bring a blush to them.

  The doves coo-coo-co-rooed again, nannylike in their warnings. Their message was clear.

  “A gift!” I reminded myself out loud, beginning to shiver, not from fever but from fear. What if I had arrived without a gift? The king, a fat slug who was so obese he had to ride his charger sidesaddle, would have had my father exorcised by his priests if I forgot to gift his child. Exorcism on a male fey is very painful for the essence is slowly drawn out and then captured in a bottle. Imagine my dear, gentle father corked up for as long as the king or his kin liked. It was too horrible to contemplate. One of Father’s brothers had been exorcised by a Kilkenny abbot and was still locked up in a dusty carafe on the back shelf of the monastery wine cellar and labeled Bordeaux, 79. As that was a terrible year for wines, Father does not expect anyone will ever uncork him. Father visits once a year and they shout at one another through the glass. Then father returns whey-faced and desperate-looking. But only a human can free Uncle Finn. Father, alas, cannot.

  Is it any wonder that I turned right around and ran back into the pavilion to the storeroom in which the trunk stood?

  The oaken trunk was locked with a fine-grained pinewood key but the key was only for show. The trunk was bolted with a family spell. I spoke it quickly:

  Come thou, cap and lid,

  Lift above what has been hid,

  All Out!

  The last two words were done in the shouting voice and the whole, as with all magic, made my head hurt. But as the final note ended, the top of the trunk snapped open.

  I peered in and at first thought the trunk was empty for the tatty Cloth was working again. Then, as I looked more closely, the Cloth suddenly failed around the edges and I saw the tip of the spindle.

  “Blessed Loireg,” I said with a sigh, praising my great-great-aunt, a patroness of Hebrides spinners. I reached down and the spindle leaped to my hand.

  Clutching the spindle to my breast, I ran out the door and along the winding forest paths toward the castle. Since it was morning, and I being still weak with fever, I could not fly. So of course I was very late. The christening, begun promptly at cock’s crow—how humans love the daylight hours—was almost done.

  I had wrapped the Cloth about my shoulders for warmth and so, on and off, I had been invisible throughout the trip. A cacophony of crows had noticed me; a family of squirrels had not. A grazing deer, warned by my scent, had seemed puzzled when I did not appear; a bear, pawing honey from a tree, was startled when I popped into view. But by the time I reached the castle the Cloth was working again and so the guards did not question my late entrance for they did not know I had come in.

  I stopped for a moment at the throne room door and peered around. The king and queen were sitting upon their high gilded chairs. He was—as I have noted before—fat, but Father said he had not always been so. Self-indulgence had thickened his neck and waist and the strong chin that had marked generations of his family repeated itself twice more, the third chin resting on his chest. On the other hand his wife, unsoftened by child-birth, had grown leaner over the years, vulpine, the skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones and marked with lines like a plotter’s map.

  Before them was a canopied cradle, its silken draperies drawn back to reveal the child who was, at present, screaming in a high-pitched voice that demonstrated considerable staying power. My father and brothers and sisters were encircling the cradle where Father, having just conferred his gift, was still bending down to kiss the squawling babe.

  I stepped into the room and had passed several bored courtiers, when the Cloth suddenly failed, revealing me before I had time to recomb my hair or straighten my bent wings or paste a smile across my mouth. I had two bright spots of fever back on my cheeks and my eyes were wild. I looked, my eldest sister later told me, “a rage.” But at least I did not shout. In fact, it was all I could do to get out a word, what with all that running. Stumbling forward, the spindle thrust out before me, I almost fell into the cradle. I accidentally stepped on one of the rockers and the cradle tilted back and forth. The infant, its attention caught by the movement, stopped crying.

  Into the sudden silence, I croaked, “For Talia—a present of Life.” And I pulled on the black thread that was wrapped around the spindle. But I must have pulled too hard on the old knotted thread. It broke after scarcely an inch.

  Everyone in the court gasped and the queen cried out, “Not Life but Death.”

  The king stood up and roared, “Seize her,” but of course at that moment the Cloth worked again and I disappeared. In my horror at what I had done, I took several steps back, dropping the spindle and the snippet of thread. Both became visible the moment they left my hand, but no one could find me.

  Father bent down, picked up the thread, and shook his head.

  “What damage?” whispered Mother. Or at least she tried to whisper. It came out, as did everything her family said in haste, in a shout.

  “Indeed,” the king cried, “what damage?”

  Father took out his spectacles, a measuring tape, and a slide rule. After a moment, he shook his head. “By my calculations,” he said, “fifteen years, give or take a month.”

  The king knew this to be true because Father’s family had a geasa laid upon them to always tell the truth.

  The queen burst into furious sobbing and the king clutched his hands to his heart and fell back into his chair. Baby Talia started crying again, but my eldest sister surreptitiously rocked the cradle with her foot which quieted the babe at once.

  “Do something!” said the king and it was a royal command, my mother had to obey.

  “Luckily I have not yet given my gift, Sire,” Mother began, modulating her voice, though she could still be heard all the way out to the courtyard.

  Father cleared his throat. He did not believe in that kind of luck.

  But Mother, ignoring him, continued. “My gift was to have been a happy marriage, but this must take precedence.”

  “Of course, of course,” murmured the king. “If she is dead at fifteen, what use would a happy marriage be?”

  At that the queen’s sobs increased.

  Father nodded and his eyes caught the king’s and some spark of creature recognition passed between them.

  Mother bent down and retrieved the spindle. Father handed her the bit of thread. Then she held up the thread in her right hand, the spindle in her left. With a quick movement of her fingers, she tied the thread back, knotting it securely, mumbled a spell which was really just a recipe for bread, then slowly unwound a much longer piece of thread. She measured it with a calculating eye and then bit it through with a loud, satisf
ying snick.

  “There,” she said. “Talia shall have a long, long life now. But …”

  “But what?” the queen asked between sobs.

  “But there is still this rather large knot at her fifteenth year of course,” Mother explained.

  “Get on with it. Get on with it,” shouted the king. “You fey are really the most exasperating lot. Say it plainly. None of your fairy riddles.”

  Mother was about to shout back when Father elbowed her. She swallowed hastily and said, “It means she shall fall asleep on her fifteenth birthday…”

  “Give or take a month,” my father inserted.

  “… and she shall sleep for as long as it takes for the knot to be unraveled.”

  The queen smiled, smoothing out many of her worst wrinkles but adding several new ones around the mouth. “Oh, that should be no time at all.”

  Mother smiled back and said nothing, but the smile never reached her eyes. She had had no geasa laid on her tongue.

  Father, ever honest, opened his mouth to speak and Mother elbowed him back. He swallowed hastily and shut his mouth. Lies take spoken words, at least according to the restriction of his fate.

  Just then I became visible again, but at that point no one really cared.

  Fifteen years can be a long or a short time, depending upon whether one is immortal or not. Princess Talia spent her fifteen as though she had an eternity to enjoy, learning little but how far the bad temper she had inherited from her father could take her. She had the gifts of beauty and wit that we had conferred upon her and they stood her in good stead with the company she kept. But she was rather short on gratitude, kindness, and love, which take rather longer to bestow than a morning’s christening.

  I spent the fifteen years reading through the L section in Father’s library. I discovered I had an aptitude for Logic, which surprised everyone but Father. I also studied Liturgy, Lepidoptery, and Linguistics; I could do spells in seventeen tongues.