Meghan's Dragon Read online

  “Bats? Hey, come back here.”

  “They won’t hurt you, and we might not come across any if it’s still dark out.”

  “Bryan!”

  The young man came to a halt at her unusually sharp tone.

  “What does this look like to you?”

  “That’s the oilcloth my sword was wrapped in,” he replied in irritation. “You’re going to pester me about littering in this dump?”

  “And the map on it, with the instructions in your language?”

  “Oh.” Bryan returned reluctantly and looked at the oilcloth that Meghan spread out on the flat slab. He followed her finger to where it tapped on the text next to a drawing of a sword, and read out loud, “You are here.”

  “That’s a good start. How about this path with the arrows?”

  “Exit to river,” he read, pointing in the opposite direction from the tunnel he had been about to try. “I guess it’s over there.”

  “The rest can wait until we’re back home,” Meghan said, folding the oilskin and placing it in her now-empty pack. She frowned for a moment when she realized she had referred to their tent with Rowan’s troupe as home, but she supposed it was the simple truth.

  “Let’s go,” Bryan said, stalking off towards the tunnel entrance indicated by the map. If he was embarrassed at all by his prior attempt to lead them off in the wrong direction, he showed no sign of it. “Don’t forget what I said about the bats.”

  “Now you’re just trying to scare me,” Meghan retorted. “If the tunnel is sealed, how can bats get in?”

  “It’s steep, be careful,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Meghan saw that he hadn’t been kidding when she started down the tunnel, the floor of which consisted of long, slanted steps. She quickly became convinced that the original passage had been a narrow fissure, widened with magical fire, the melted rock pooling below and forming the oddly shaped stairs. The descent went on for what seemed like all night before she stumbled into Bryan’s back while she was watching her feet.

  “What is it?”

  “Dead end,” Bryan said, pointing out the obvious. “I guess your map isn’t so smart after all.”

  “Let me see. It’s probably just a plug stone, like in the tower.”

  “Then try your eighteen-step thing.”

  Meghan went through the motions calmly but nothing happened. “Open Sesame,” she muttered, hoping that Bryan wouldn’t notice her adoption of his nonsense phrase.

  “It wasn’t that,” Bryan said, trying his best not to laugh at the flustered mage. “The rock disappeared when your hands pointed at the floor. Maybe it’s the same thing here.”

  “But we’re already at the bottom,” she protested, lowering her arms. A moment later, she was underwater, choking. She panicked and started to flail about, barely aware of a large body hitting the water right beside her. Then she felt Bryan’s strong hands around her waist as he lifted the whole upper half of her body above the surface.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  Meghan coughed up some water in response.

  “We’re just below an outcrop near the bank,” Bryan told her. “If you had put your feet down instead of kicking, your head would have been out of the water. Remind me to teach you how to swim.”

  “Fish swim,” she retorted when the coughing subsided. “Just hold me up while I close the stone. You never know if it will come in handy sometime to have a secret passage into a duke’s castle.”

  Bryan lifted her high out of the river and set her on his shoulders. After the tunnel exit was closed, her weight helped him walk along through the water until the steep, rocky bank became climbable. The dawn was just starting to break when they reached the King’s Highway, and the two were back with the players before the wagon train set off. Nobody asked about their sodden appearance, but everybody noticed that the young man now had two sword belts slung loosely over his shoulder.

  Chapter 47

  Meghan lurched to the back of the props wagon and threw up over the tailboard. Her spew almost hit the two women who were walking right behind the slow-moving conveyance. She mumbled an apology, but Bethany and Dora, the seamstress, offered their congratulations.

  “That will be the morning sickness,” Dora informed Meghan. “Sucking on a hard candy can help. I’ll ask the children if they have any.”

  “Congratulations,” Bethany added. “I couldn’t ride in a wagon at all when I was expecting Davie. You’ll have to be more careful now.”

  “I’m not pregnant,” the girl protested weakly. “It’s just that I’ve never ridden in a wagon before. I didn’t expect all the swaying.”

  “Whatever you say, dear,” the seamstress replied, winking at Bethany. In her experience, the first child always came as a shock to young women. “I’ll get the wagon to halt so you can climb down.”

  “No, don’t,” Meghan protested when the implication of the troupe’s leading gossiper stopping the wagon train sank in, but it was too late. A minute later, as she climbed down with the help of Bethany, she almost fell on her face as the ground suddenly shifted.

  “Get Faye,” Dora commanded the other woman after one look at Meghan, who had turned white as a sheet. Bethany ran towards the rear of the wagon train and quickly returned with Simon’s wife, the troupe’s healer. Faye took Meghan’s head in both of her hands and turned it to one side and then the other while looking in the girl’s eyes.

  “Have you been feeling sick recently?’ she asked.

  “She’s expecting,” Dora answered for the girl.

  “I am not,” Meghan asserted again, though her voice was still weak. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so scared, unable even to maintain her own balance. “Where’s Bryan?” she added without thinking.

  “I’ll get your husband,” Bethany said, running off again.

  Faye took one of the Meghan’s hands and pressed it against the girl’s own stomach while closing her eyes in concentration. A small crowd of women and children gathered around and watched.

  “I’m sorry,” Faye told Meghan. “You aren’t with child yet.”

  “I know that,” Meghan gritted out between clenched teeth. “I’m just wagon sick.”

  “In part,” the folk healer told the girl. “There was also something in your left ear, but I think I moved it enough so your balance will return. Don’t sleep on your left side for a while, and avoid submerging your whole head when you wash your hair.”

  “Oh,” Meghan said in embarrassment, thinking about her early-morning dip in the cold river. She took an experimental step back, turned slowly, and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think I’m better now. I should have checked my ears first thing, but I guess I was too scared to think straight.”

  “You know something of healing?” Faye asked.

  “I assisted the healer in our castle growing up. She was a sort of foster mother for me.”

  “I learned a few things from my mother, but she wasn’t trained as a healer. I hope you can make some time to share your knowledge with me.”

  “Of course,” Meghan said, relieved to see that everybody else had lost interest as soon as she recovered.

  “Are you alright?” Bryan demanded, pulling her arm half out of its socket as he jerked her around to look at her.

  “It’s nothing,” Meghan said, secretly pleased by the look of worry on his face. “I just have to keep my head out of rivers for a few days.”

  Chapter 48

  The wagons halted for the evening at the edge of a field with plenty of wild grazing for the draft horses. Rowan gave Bryan the nod to join him for an evening training session. The two stopped at the props wagon to don mail shirts, hooded garments constructed from light chain links with three-quarter-length sleeves. Most of the men and boys who weren’t busy doing something else tagged along to watch as Rowan selected a place.

  “I see you found yourself a new sword,” Rowan said, glancing at the fancy scabbard Bryan balanced over his shoulder
with his right hand on the hilt. “Last-minute purchase at the festival?”

  “I sort of found it. I mean, it was left for me. From my wife’s family,” Bryan hastily amended himself.

  “If the blade matches the scabbard, it would be a shame to damage it in practice. Mind if I take a look at it before we begin?”

  At first Bryan bristled at the suggestion, but then he remembered that he didn’t know the first thing about enchanted swords. The last thing he wanted was to get a notch in the beautiful blade while sparring with the powerful giant whose own sword was obviously of the highest grade. He reluctantly removed the weapon from his shoulder and passed it to Rowan.

  The leader of the troupe pulled a short length of the blade out of the scabbard and examined it closely. “Beautiful work. This is from Old Land, the imperial armory. This blade could easily be a thousand years old. Does it sing for you?”

  “Sing?” Bryan thought for a moment. “I guess it hummed a little when I first drew it.”

  The men gathered around them exchanged significant looks, and Jomar gave a low whistle, clapping the young man on the back.

  “Looks like you’re the one who’s going to have to worry about getting dings in your sword,” Hardol said to Rowan in a joking tone.

  The large man snorted. “Old Slayer will hold her own. Make room for us.”

  The men and boys backed away, forming a circle around the small patch of sand by the riverbank that Rowan had chosen. Bryan drew his sword and tossed the scabbard to Hardol, then he waited for his opponent to make the first move. He heard his sword humming like a tuning fork, but nobody else showed any sign of hearing it.

  Rowan usually opened their duels with a bull’s rush, after which Bryan was lucky to launch one offensive blow for every ten he parried. Today, the giant approached slowly, his sword resting on his shoulder as if he were marching with an army. Afraid of some trick, Bryan gripped the hilt of his own sword in both hands, eyes on the big man’s blade, waiting for the attack. Suddenly he found himself on his back gasping for breath, a dull ache in the stomach where Rowan had kicked him.

  “Now that you have the best sword around, I thought I’d better remind you that there’s more to fighting than weapons,” Rowan said, pulling Bryan back to his feet. “You were staring up above my shoulder like you were looking down a tunnel.”

  “I didn’t know kicking was allowed,” Bryan wheezed, bent over and still fighting to catch his breath.

  “Allowed?” Rowan bellowed over the storm of laughter from the observers. “It’s fighting, boy. Everything goes. If you ever go out with an army, you can expect fireballs from mages, anything that can be launched by a catapult, arrows and javelins, and attacks from any direction that isn’t occupied by a friend.”

  Bryan took advantage of the long speech to venture an opportunist slash at Rowan’s hip, the lowest point the chain mail reached on the giant’s body, but the man was expecting it and parried effortlessly. A shower of sparks flew off when their swords made contact, causing both men to leap back and examine their blades.

  “I haven’t seen that happen in a while,” Hardol remarked drily.

  “No damage here,” Rowan said after a minute inspection of his blade. “How about yours?”

  “Looks alright to me,” Bryan replied. The sword’s humming hadn’t changed in pitch. “Does this sort of thing happen a lot with enchanted swords?”

  “Not as often as you might expect,” Rowan replied. “Come now. Why don’t you attack me for a change?”

  After ten minutes of exchanging ferocious blows, Bryan was dripping sweat and hungry, though he wasn’t panting like he had in their earlier encounters. Somehow he was sure that the sword was influencing his actions, making its own choices about when to cut and parry, and he fought without thinking. But his opponent looked as fresh as ever, and Bryan noticed that the five men he thought of as Rowan’s lieutenants were grinning broadly.

  “What so funny?” he demanded, backing away and resting his naked blade on his shoulder, the universal sign for taking a break.

  “Is one of your legs longer than the other that you keep falling off to the short side?” Hardol asked playfully. “Your blade work has gotten pretty fancy all of a sudden, but you must have moved a hundred times as far as Rowan while he just shifts his feet. Look at the sand. He had you running in circles.”

  Bryan glanced down and saw that the ex-soldier had spoken the truth. Rowan was standing at the center of a small circle, the sand well flattened by his smooth footwork, while Bryan had practically dug a shallow trench around him, moving in an endless left-to-right circle.

  “At least he’s staying engaged rather than running away,” Theodric observed. “That’s more than you can say for most who face Old Slayer.”

  “Where am I going wrong?” Bryan asked, directing the question at Simon.

  The old soldier shook his head. “It would be easier to explain what you’re doing right.” The remaining observers broke into laughter again, though most of the boys and some of the men had drifted off in ones and twos when the odor of cooking reached them. “That sword has accepted you as its master, and from the stories they tell about the old enchanted weapons, it will be your teacher from now on.”

  “But Rowan is still toying with me,” Bryan complained, pointing at the circular track in the sand. “I mean, sure, he’s bigger and stronger and has much more experience, but…”

  “But nothing,” Simon rebuked him. “You’ve had less than three weeks training, and you’re complaining that you can’t beat the biggest and strongest man any of us have ever seen. A man with an enchanted sword of his own, I might point out.”

  “What is your magic, Rowan?” Bryan asked.

  The leader of the players smiled. “It’s not for acting, I’ll admit that much. Shall we go another round?”

  The dinner bell on the kitchen wagon began to ring. Bryan reclaimed his scabbard from Hardol, sheathed his sword, and made a beeline for food.

  Chapter 49

  “I get that these are more instructions for unmaking magical knots, four of them, I think,” Meghan said. “But I won’t know where to go and do the untying until you translate the rest of this.”

  “It’s late,” Bryan protested. “I was up all night. Can’t it wait for tomorrow?” He wasn’t really that tired, but reading faded English calligraphy from a stained old oilskin wasn’t his idea of excitement. Instead he moved next to the girl and snuck an arm around her shoulders. “Are you sure you’re feeling better?”

  “I’m fine, thank you very much,” she said, firmly removing his arm and then passing him the map. “The treasure might be around the next curve in the road, or the last curve, for all we know. Just read it to me now, and then you won’t have to come up with excuses not to.”

  “The clues in games usually came as voice-overs,” Bryan grumbled. He increased the brightness of the illumination orb he had conjured up in their tent and focused on the faded script, moving his lips silently.

  “Well?” Meghan asked impatiently.

  “It doesn’t make much sense,” he warned her before starting to read.

  “Above the green fields, a room full of shields, behind she who wields, see what it yields.

  Makers of brew, for men who are blue, heat the wort true, check in the flue.

  When night turns to black, a stab in the back, an old traitor’s sack, something you lack.

  Water that’s white, falls at its right, from the first bite, take what you might.”

  “Why is it all riddles?” Meghan mused out loud. “I mean, they’re obvious enough, but why not tell us straight out what to do?”

  “What’s obvious? All I get out of it is that we’re on some sort of treasure hunt, and I could have guessed that from my experience playing games.”

  “Four riddles, four verses each, four colors. Well, five if you count the first riddle from my pendant, but that had four verses as well.”

  “So?”

  “We found
your sword at the Red Duke’s castle, now we have four to go. The green is next, then the blue, then the black, and finally the white.”

  Bryan looked back at the oilcloth. “Oh yeah, I forgot about the dukes and the colors. So first we go to the Green Duke’s castle and find a room full of shields where we look behind some lady warrior, maybe a statue or a wall-hanging.”

  “Just like that,” Meghan said, eyeing him with a mixture of surprise and respect. “You’re willing to go snooping around all of the greatest castles in the land with me, even though there’s a reward for our capture.”

  “Your capture,” Bryan reminded her. “Storm Bringer said I was worth the same money dead or alive. Besides, we just raided a castle on top of a cliff in the middle of the night and came away with the goods. Now I have my sword and I’m getting stronger every day, so the rest should be a piece of cake.”

  “Don’t you wonder about the coincidence that our quest is to visit the five castles, and here we find ourselves with Rowan’s players who happen to be traveling the same route?”

  “Good things happen to good people,” Bryan retorted. “You worry too much.”

  “That’s because I have to do the worrying for both of us.”

  Bryan leaned over, took her head in both hands, and tried to plant a quick kiss on her lips. She managed to turn her face down just enough that he got her nose instead.

  “Stop it,” she said, getting her hand between their faces and pushing. “Don’t you get it? If we share our magic now we both might end up stuck halfway, never reaching our full potential.”

  “I think you’re just scared,” Bryan said, but he released her and crawled out of the tent.

  “Where are you going? I thought you were tired.” she called after him.

  “I’m going for another dip in the river.”

  “But it’s cold.”

  “That’s the whole point,” he muttered for his own ears, pulling off his shirt as he headed for the riverbank.