TESS?” GARTH’S HEAD was thrown back to peer up at me in the branches. “Why scurry up a tree? The stew will be ready soon. Won’t you come down?”
I gripped my knife. Why had I trusted him? I knew better than to trust a man. “You’re angry with me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Don’t lie; I know anger when I see it.” He looked so small standing far below. Like a grounded blackbird.
Seagull trotted up to him and whinnied. Garth patted her neck. “Now see, you have Seagull worried.”
“Tell her I am happy up here in the tree.”
“She is happy up there in the tree, Seagull.”
I smiled a little. “Tell her I am tired of sudden anger, of punching fists, black eyes, cuts, and bruises.”
“She is tired of sudden anger, fists—”
“Punching fists,” I corrected.
“Of punching fists, black eyes, cuts, and bruises.”
Seagull huffed and nodded. Garth and I laughed.
“Will you come down now and have some dinner?”
“You go ahead and eat. You must be famished.” I felt gnawing hunger but would not admit it. The man did not obey. Instead he climbed. My breath caught. What was he doing?
Garth positioned himself on a thick branch across from me and slightly lower so his head was not quite as high as mine.
“This is my tree,” I said.
He poked a pinecone. “So you own it?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Do you plan to cut a branch?” he asked, looking at my blade.
I didn’t answer. A squirrel leaped pine to pine, then raised his brushy tail, calling Cheet! Cheet!
“He thinks your tree belongs to him,” Garth said.
“Sir Squirrel,” I said, “you can have your domicile back soon enough.”
“So you mean to come down eventually?”
When I did not respond he added, “Do you want to know what angered me?”
I fingered the blade.
“You dreamed of Princess Augusta.”
“How do you know it was she?”
“I told you I was a castle knight. I did not mention my father was a friend of the royal family. My father, my brother, and I often traveled with them when I was a boy.”
“Did you go with them to the hunting lodge?”
He nodded. “The lodge in fall, the castle on Dragon’s Keep in summer. I played with the princes when we were boys.”
“Then you’ve… seen their little sister?”
“The one you called the hideous monster? She is but four years old now. I visited her a few times with Prince Bion, though Prince Arden has never gone to see the child.”
“He’s been busy on crusade,” I said.
“Busy? Is that what he’s been?”
I felt his irritation raising the hairs along my arms, but Garth had climbed the pine to speak with me, not thrash me. “The girl in my dream was more than four years old. It might not have been Princess Augusta.”
“You described her face, Tess: the scaly half of her forehead and her copper-colored dragon eyes. It was her.”
I swallowed, remembering the girl had snatched a baby from my arms. What did it mean?
“What is she like?” I asked cautiously.
“Like a four-year-old girl,” he said. “She is no more a monster than the rest of the Pendragons whose scales are hidden on wrist or neck or arm. She did not ask to be so marked, but it’s too much for most folk. Even her father could not look at her.”
I thought of King Kadmi rejecting his youngest child. Was it only for her looks? “There might be other reasons.” I told Garth that Poppy’s mother had died birthing her. That her father had resented her because of it and kept her as a man does a thoroughbred animal for its value and not for love.
Garth was silent. I could not read his expression in the dark. The pine swayed in the damp wind. We held our branches, riding the gusts. He seems as much at home as I am up here, I thought. I liked him well for it.
“If you’re such good friends with Prince Bion, why aren’t you with him searching for the missing treasure now?”
Garth rode another gust before answering. “He asked me to guard that part of Dragonswood.”
“Why that part?”
“Bion fears the sanctuary walls there might be breached. The sheriff in Oxhaven is a powerful man and one who would like to see the boundary walls come down. He’d use the excuse of hunting for the missing treasure for a start.”
“Then it’s dangerous for you to leave and ride south with me.”
He shook his head. “I have allies, Tess, and they guard that part of Dragonswood while I’m away.”
“And what’s Prince Bion doing while you and your friends guard the wood?”
The wind had quieted. I felt the night wrap around me as I waited for his answer. “Other than combing the isle for the treasure?” he said with some rigidity. “If you want to know, Prince Bion has to keep an eye on the king’s regent, Sackmoore, a crooked man if there ever was one.”
Crooked? I considered the man who had funded Lady Adela’s hunts. Garth was watching his tongue in my company. There were baser words to describe the demon.
The gusts had swept the sky clean of clouds. Garth clutched the branch, straightened his arms, and leaned back to spy the stars through the greenery. The moon was like a half-gone pie.
“Nice up here. How often do you scale trees?”
“I cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
“Will not.”
“Often then,” he guessed. “You surprise me.”
“I’m glad.”
He laughed outright. “Are you ready to come down?”
“I might like to taste your stew.”
“So hunger wins,” he said.
I slid my knife in my belt and climbed down after him. When I jumped from the lowest branch, he caught me, and held me a moment. The touch sent a clean wind through me, sweet and strong. If I could have stayed there all through the passing night, I would have. But he let me go and we trailed back to the boulder and the warm rabbit stew.
UNBUCKLING GOODFELLOW’S SADDLEBAG, Garth pulled out two wooden bowls. Wolves howled somewhere in the distance. Our eyes locked. “We’ll keep the fire going throughout the night,” Garth said. “And if they come closer we can always climb yon tree,” he added with a teasing smile.
The howling continued. How could he jest about such a thing? But behind the light talk, I saw caution. Scrambling up the tree would keep us from the wolves’ jaws. I thanked God we’d seen no bear scat in the woods. Bears are veteran climbers.
“How clearly did you see the dragon who rescued the girl from the fire?”
“It was night, but I saw he was very large.”
“An old one then,” Garth said, filling my bowl.
“An old one,” I agreed. “And one I’d seen before.”
“When?” He did not try to hide his curiosity, but had stopped mid-pour, holding the bowl up between us and looking at me through the rising steam.
I’d told him about my witch trial back at the lodge the night he’d showed me the pearl. But I’d not detailed my escape from Harrowton. He handed me my bowl. I was about to tell him how the old dragon rescued me, dropping a turtle in Miller’s Pond, when I felt as if a cold hand encircled my throat. Don’t speak of it.
I glanced down and blew on the hot stew. I already told him the dragon rescued the burning girl, why not mention my rescue? The invisible hand seemed to tighten. I fought against it, sipped the stew to bring warmth back to my throat. Was this my own caution or something else preventing me? Tell him about the other time. “I saw the same old dragon one night when I’d climbed a tree.”
“In Dragonswood?”
I nodded.
“So you were also a lawbreaker, Tess.”
“I never hunted in the wood,” I said. “I just went there to be alone and think.”
“And recover from your father’s blows?” he guessed. His look was kind.
Again I nodded. “I saw the old dragon the night before we buried Adam.”
Garth’s look asked Who was Adam? but he waited for me to say more.
The cold hand was no longer at my throat. I could eat from my bowl; still, I was finding it difficult to speak. “Adam was my baby brother,” I whispered. “I’d gone to Dragonswood to cry. Seeing the dragon… helped. He breathed a stream of fire over the Harrow River. It was beautiful,” I added.
Garth nodded. “Dragons can be wiser than men, though they’re wilder.” He tasted his stew, and ate some more.
“Did you meet dragons on Dragon’s Keep?” He’d only just told me of his boyhood travels. I was trying not to be jealous. “Have you ever spoken with one?” I added eagerly before he could even answer my first question.
He nodded. “I have, and I can tell you this. The dragons wonder that we, the weaker race, should have taken over the world, driving them from their wilderness in the last few thousand years.”
I knew the dragons died without vast hunting ranges. I also knew the jealousies the sanctuary provoked. “Men like my father want the dragons and the fey booted out. He often talked of tearing down the walls so he could hunt and fish and harvest the timber there for his forge.”
“A common sentiment,” Garth said. “Men high and low want the wood back, the lords no less than commoners. The king’s regent knows it too. In fact he counts on it. Sackmoore would destroy the sanctuary if he had the power.”
“Then Prince Arden best hurry home,” I said.
“Amen to that,” he whispered. Garth sat cross-legged on the ground in his mud-stained jerkin. A proud man and strong, he was concerned for his section of Dragonswood, I could see that, yet he’d taken us in. Now we were on a mercy mission for Meg. “Why have you been so kind to us?”
He shrugged. “I knew from the first you weren’t witches.” He sloshed more stew into his bowl. “I could not leave you out there to die, could I?”
“Some might have.” I studied his face, half in light and half in shadow, the fire and night taking what they may. “Was it because… did it have to do with what Lady Adela did to your grandmother?” I asked cautiously, knowing it might upset him.
“The witch hunter didn’t harm my grandmother.”
“But you said your grandmother was tried for witchcraft.”
“She was. I would not lie to you about that, Tess, but it was years and years ago.”
“Was she…” I fought the bile coming up my throat. “Did they burn her at the stake?” I pictured Garth as a small boy, seeing his grandmother taken, perhaps witnessing her death. Some people took their youngsters to witch burnings. My father brought me when I was just seven.
“No, Tess. She was lucky. She lived.”
He would not tell me more of her, though I asked not only from my heart, but because I wanted to know how she’d gotten away. I’d heard of no other women aside from myself and the one the dragon rescued who escaped after their witch trial.
Garth finished his meal and left the fire. I did not follow him. I could tell the man needed to be alone. The stewpot sat cooling near my feet. The fire’s heat silvered the air above. I watched Garth brushing Goodfellow’s mane as if through glass. The burningstone greened the fire; flames moved like living dragon scales. The green man I’d first seen in the fire-sight long ago continued to surprise me. I sat very still, my body at rest, my heart full.