YOLANDHE’S ISLAND
Beryl Spencer hugged her arms to herself. Even when the sun shone over the island, the air was damp and cold. Raw. She missed the hills of Mirwell Province where it wasn’t so damp that it made your bones hurt. Clouds flowed in streamers overhead and cold landward breezes combed through her hair. She watched as Yap sliced through the belly of another fish. She was heartily sick of fish—roasted fish, dried fish, stewed fish, raw fish, fried fish. Even the occasional seabirds Yap trapped tasted like fish because that’s what seabirds ate. Seabird eggs weren’t too bad, but they were usually fried in fish oil, so they, too, tasted like fish.
Yap pulled out the guts of the fish and tossed them aside. Before they could slap the rocky beach, Scorch snapped them up and hastily swallowed them, then crooned in anticipation for more.
“Yer a glutton, and that’s for sure,” Yap told the little dragon.
Little, Beryl reflected, as in the size of a pony. Dragon. She was still having a hard time accepting the concept of dragons present and living in her world. They had always ever been ancient myth, the province of bedtime stories and the poems of long-dead bards.
Scorch hopped in place and flicked his tail in anticipation as Yap held another treat aloft. When he tossed it, Scorch caught the fish head neatly in his maw very much like a well-trained dog. A dog, that was, with gray-brown scales, lizard-like feet with long talons, and membranous wings. Scorch couldn’t fly for his wings were too small, stunted. He was a runt or otherwise inferior to, and rejected by, the other dragons, or so Yap claimed. She had to admit that Scorch was easier to take than the big ones. There wasn’t much in the world that made Beryl Spencer shudder, but the big ones did.
“Come here, my lad,” Yap told Scorch. He patted his leg to get the dragon to follow him. They went to where there was a pile of driftwood. “C’mon, do yer thing.”
Scorch drew his head back, then hacked and belched until fire flared from his jaw and sparked the wood. The dry fuel exploded into flame. Yap patted Scorch’s head and scratched between the ridge plates of his neck. The dragon crooned. It was convenient to have a fire lit so easily.
“We’ll have a good stew tonight,” Yap cheerfully told the dragon.
Beryl pulled up the hood of her coat against the incessant wind. Great. Fish stew. “You said Lord Amberhill has gone to the east side of the island this morning?” she asked Yap.
“Aye. Him and the lady.”
The lady, the sea witch, Yolandhe. The east end of the island reared out of the water in high vertical cliffs and was exposed to the full brunt of the open ocean. It was there that Amberhill went to commune with his dragons, the big ones. Beryl didn’t know exactly what this entailed as she was forbidden to leave their cove. Scorch was not only Yap’s pet, but her guard dog. As appealing as his size and snub-beaked nose was, he would not think twice about biting off her leg.
Amberhill had recognized her when she floated half-dead to shore after her sailing dory pitched over in the raging currents near the island. They’d pulled her to land and tended her. She thought Yolandhe might have used some sort of magic to help heal her worst hurts, though she still had headaches and blurred vision from having cracked her head on a reef.
They also knew she wasn’t there by chance. They had no reason to suspect King Zachary wanted Amberhill returned to Sacor City because Karigan G’ladheon had seen what he would become in the future, what he’d do to their world. They had no reason to suspect that if she could not drag him back to Sacor City, she was to assassinate him. All she’d done thus far was recite the king’s wish that he return. No reason given, no ultimatums made. And yet, she sensed they suspected. Yolandhe was a witch, after all, and who knew what she could divine.
It would seem Amberhill was not there by chance, either. As Yap explained it, Amberhill had been drawn across the sea. He knew not by what means, and at the same time to where, but the pull to the island had proved relentless. Like Beryl when her dory had gotten caught in the hazardous currents around the islands of the Northern Sea archipelago, so had theirs, and they had likewise crashed upon the shore.
Scorch suddenly whimpered and leaped behind Yap’s legs. Yap looked out to sea and she followed his gaze. Glowing orange eyes and a row of dorsal ridges appeared above the crests of waves. No wonder Scorch was scared. She backed up the beach, herself, and a good thing for the dragon reared up with prey in its great jaws, and with a toss of its head, launched a corpse ashore. The heavy body of a seal crashed onto the stone beach just inches from where she’d been standing.
The dragon regarded them for a moment with its blazing eyes, its huge head perched on a neck that was as tall and straight as a ship’s mast. Wet scales of aquamarine glistened in the sun. And then it sank into the water and disappeared. Scorch sighed, exhaling a puff of smoke.
“Why do I get the feeling that dragon was deciding whether or not to eat us,” Beryl said.
“Naw,” Yap replied. “My master says they have enough prey in the ocean that they won’t bother with us scrawny, boney people.”
He had told her that the dragons, large as they were, could kill a small whale individually, and the largest of whales if they hunted in schools. Herds? What did one call a group of dragons?
“We’ll have seal and fish stew tonight,” Yap said in satisfaction. He drew his knife out again and made his way over to the dead seal.
It would still taste just like fish, she thought.
Beryl stood off some distance from where Yap slaughtered the seal in order to escape the stench of raw, bloody meat and exposed offal. Some time passed before Amberhill and Yolandhe returned. They strolled out of the woods and onto the beach. Yolandhe wore a simple kilt of seagrass green and a necklace of pearls and sea glass. She never seemed to feel the cold. As for Amberhill, Beryl had hardly recognized him. When last she had seen him, he’d a lean-muscled build, but now he was thin and wiry. His clothes hung off him in rags, but he carried, in contrast, a jewel-encrusted knife at his side, and she wondered where he’d acquired it. His hair and beard had grown long and wild. But it wasn’t just his outward appearance that had changed. When he gazed at her, sometimes she sensed someone else wise and ancient surveying her, but then he would seem to return to himself, an ordinary man befuddled as if he didn’t know what was going on around him.
Before Beryl had been sent on her mission to find Amberhill, she had been briefed by the king’s spymasters on what was known of Karigan G’ladheon’s excursion to the future time. Karigan herself had forgotten much of it, a strange quirk of traveling from the future to the past, it seemed. But before her memories had completely disappeared, she told King Zachary and Captain Mapstone what she could remember, and the captain transcribed her words. Beryl had read and reread the transcription trying to piece it all together. Karigan’s memories had been sporadic and confused, but it was clear Amberhill was a danger to the realm, that with the use of some great weapon, he had deposed the king . . . would depose the king in the near future. This thing about time was confusing. In any case, he would depose the king and crush any opposition, and would somehow continue to exist almost two hundred years into the future as a tyrannical emperor inhabited by Mornhavon the Black. Karigan had described the harsh existence of ordinary people in that time, and how slavery was condoned. The Sacoridia of the future had been devastated.
With this knowledge brought back by Karigan, King Zachary hoped that preemptive action would prevent Amberhill from using his great weapon, and that Sacoridia and its people would be spared. Karigan had not learned what this “great weapon” was, but Beryl thought she now knew.
“Is the seal satisfactory?” Amberhill asked Yap. Despite his feral appearance, he retained the refined speech of one who was raised in the aristocracy.
Yap popped up from his work on the belly of the seal corpse, his hands covered in gore. “Oh, aye, sir! It will make a fine stew and supply us with lard. The hide will also make a good blanket.”
Amberhill did not really seem to care, nor did he give Beryl a second look. Yolandhe certainly did not. The two were probably going to return to their cave to do what they always did. They never tired of it.
On impulse, she asked Amberhill, “What are you training those dragons to do?”
Amberhill paused, and Yolandhe beside him. “Training?” he asked. “I suppose in a sense it is that, but is it they who are being trained, or me?” Then his tone grew sharp with that odd, swift personality change. “How do you know this? Have you been spying on us?”
It was the switch of tone that always took Beryl aback. He’d be his congenial self, then change and become hard, like a completely different man. Karigan had alluded to this, that Amberhill as emperor had been volatile due to the conflicting personalities that inhabited him.
Yap popped up again, some stringy gore clinging to his cracked specs. “Sir, sorry, sir, but I may have told her.” Before Amberhill could lash out, he hastily continued, “Seeing as we’re all stuck on this island for eternity, sir, I didn’t think it would hurt anything.”
The anger melted from Amberhill’s face and he was once more himself. “No harm,” he murmured. He and Yolandhe started to walk on.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Beryl said. “What are you training the dragons for?”
“Does it have to be for something?” Yolandhe asked.
Yolandhe was always protective of Amberhill, and Beryl was acutely aware she did not like the presence of another woman on the island at all, that Yolandhe considered her a rival for Amberhill’s affection.
“Perhaps,” Amberhill said with a slight smile, “I do not wish for them to eat us.”
So much for Yap’s explanation that the dragons wouldn’t eat boney humans. Beryl did not press Amberhill, and he and Yolandhe continued on. She was not in the position of power she required to get all the answers she wanted. She was not precisely a captive, but it was close enough. Yolandhe was an unknown. If she were indeed some kind of sea witch, she might have powers that would easily overcome Beryl. Could Amberhill turn the dragons against her? She watched Scorch slurping up seal entrails. Sending their “watch dog” against her would be bad enough, runt though he may be. She did not care to die from immolation or to be shredded by his toothy maw.
She would bide her time, let them get used to her presence. Let them think she was resigned to being stranded on the island. They’d get careless after a while. Not watch her as closely. She could use the time, she decided, to sort through the various obstacles before her and figure out how to overcome them. If she killed Amberhill, how would she get off the island and past the dragons? And what would that mean for people should the dragons decide to maraud the mainland? Even if she managed to take Amberhill alive, she faced the same problems, only he might be able to command the dragons to stop her escape. Flames and munching. That’s where all her plans led, to flames and munching. There wasn’t even a way off the island. And maybe that was the answer to everything, to just surrender to life there and make sure Amberhill and his dragons never left.
It was not, of course, what she wanted. In any case, if a way off the island came to light, she’d best stick to the plan of letting them get used to her. In time, her injured head might clear, too.
The toe of her boot nudged something and she bent to pick it up. A fish head.
“Hey, Scorch,” she said. When the little dragon looked her way, she tossed it to him. “Catch, boy!”
He deftly caught it in midair and gulped it down. It was her first step in getting them to accept her.