At dinner, after the men had slaked the first rush of their hunger, they talked about the war, or mostly, Hal did, now and then referring to Captain Wender for reinforcement or a clarification of fact. He spoke quietly because the news was bad.
“We’ve been beaten up at every turn. An army without training or proper weapons facing the barons’ mercenary knights and infantry . . .”
“These farmers’ hearts are gallant,” put in Wender. “But most would do better by the plough than by the sword.”
Hal nodded. “Still, if mere numbers would win the day, we’d have a fighting chance. And all’s not lost. We had split the army even before we heard of the Prince’s death. Rainer’s taken part of our force west to raise men and provisioning among the estates not corrupted by Fra Guill on his first tour through the countryside.” Hal made maps on the tabletop, with spoons and platters and lines of bread crumbs. “I sought to draw the rebels southward. When it became clear that this mad priest would go on fighting no matter what the weather, I sent His Majesty west to Köln, where hopefully, he will last the winter. He is not well, and Carl’s death has grieved him sorely. The truth is, we’d be in full retreat but for these recent heavy snows, which have forced even Fra Guill to call a halt.”
“A mercy,” Rose murmured.
“If it was an honest winter, there’d be a mercy in it. But this weather’s as unnatural as the priest himself. It’ll clear and we’ll have a bit of a thaw, just enough to sink every cartwheel hub-deep in mud. Then as soon as we’re good and stuck, it’ll freeze and the hell-priest’ll be on us again. It’s uncanny. There’s some saying he has the weather in his thrall.”
Rose nodded. “Those rumors have reached even this far.”
“How could such a thing be?” muttered Doritt.
Hal blew out a long sigh. “Well, I’d hate to credit it, but somehow he’s always prepared and we’re always surprised. We could use a few month’s rest, not a few days. Aye, Wender?”
“Aye indeed, milord.” The captain lifted his mug of ale in salute. “Were there food like this to rest with.”
“Or any place left to rest in.” Hal gathered the bread crumbs into a pile as if saving them for later. “Guillemo’s ordered his men to burn any village or farmstead that refuses to pledge to his cause.”
“And join his march,” added Wender. “The roads are filled with refugees, even in this weather. The devil’s own spawn, he is.”
Captain Wender was just as Erde’s dreams had presented him: Köthen’s most favored and loyal man, a tough battle veteran who had followed him unquestioningly into exile. But she thought Wender seemed a bit more at home on the King’s side, which might explain Hal’s easy way with him, and his willingness to trust this former enemy, while not his superior lord.
That lord sat silently now, a bit apart, as if news of the war no longer interested him. He had eaten little—just enough, Erde thought, to keep from making a show of refusing his hostess’ hospitality. Nowhere near enough to sustain him, and certainly not enough to soak up the quantities of drink he was consuming. Raven had at first taken up station across from him, laughing and sipping from his cup in a flirty, familiar way designed to keep it out of his own hands as much as possible. He’d replied briefly, politely to her queries about people and events in the past, the youth they’d obviously shared, but he would not speak of the present, the war, or his situation. Eventually, Raven gave up and left him alone.
Erde wished he wouldn’t drink so much. He reminded her too much of her father. But surely it was more than rage and shame twisting in him. He was like one grief-stricken, like a woman who’s lost an only child, or like Josef her father, who’d lost a beloved wife. Erde wondered how a mere throne could mean as much, but nonetheless, she thought she understood Baron Köthen better than anyone in the room, and she felt heartsick for him. She did not even ask why. She herself could hardly eat, even though Sir Hal, in his courtly way, had reverted to the habit developed during their travels together, of transferring the tenderest morsels to her own platter.
“And how has the King received young Rainer?” Rose inquired.
Hal shrugged. “In public, merely politely. In private, he has expressed some possibility. Wisely, Rainer has not pressed his claim officially. We let the rumors circulate, but there yet remains the problem of proof. Our best hope is popular acclaim.”
Down the long table, Baron Köthen stirred. “Fine conspirators you are, so beset by moral standards. Can’t you discover a convenient birthmark? Isn’t that the usual ploy?”
Hal eyed him with impatience. “Dolph refuses to believe that Prince Ludolph could have survived the baron’s plotting. After all, a true heir—one who actually wants the throne—would be very inconvenient to his purposes.”
Raven propped her chin on her fists. “What if Rainer of Duchen is the lost prince?”
“He isn’t,” Köthen growled.
“But what if he is? Speculate. What would you do?”
Köthen looked cornered. He sipped his wine and seemed to find great interest in the decoration of the cup.
“He’s young, strong, intelligent, probably very able,” Raven pursued. “It seems he’s even charismatic. What if he is, Dolph?”
Köthen refused to meet her bright, insistent stare. He laughed lightly, gestured bravely with his goblet. “Then there would be no further use for me.”
“A strong king needs strong advisers,” Rose countered.
“I can think of several uses for you,” Raven smiled.
And Erde wondered if it was only she who heard, not a fallen lord’s drunken plea for sympathy, but a man’s sober, bitter conviction. That his life was over.
Finally the empty bowls and trenchers were stacked and cleared. Doritt threw more wood on the fire. The women refilled their cups with heated cider or wine, and everyone—except Köthen—drew nearer. Erde understood that it was finally time to tell her own story. She reached out to the dragon in the barn, for his support and commentary, then gathered N’Doch and Water-as-Sedou beside her.
“Well . . . after Lord Earth rescued Hal and Rainer and myself from Erfurt and brought us back to Deep Moor, he heard the voice of the Summoner ever more strongly, calling him back to the Quest. So we left to follow it.”
“Without even warning us,” Hal complained.
She tipped her head apologetically. “You were so distracted with the war and the idea that Rainer was . . .”
“I know, I know, but the Quest . . .”
“Would you have gone?” asked Rose. “Would you have left the war behind? Would you have deserted your King?”
Hal pursed his lips. “A difficult choice.”
“So, you see? The wise beast saved you that choice.”
“Let the child continue,” demanded Doritt from the fireplace.
Now Erde felt self-conscious, with the entire household watching. She cleared her throat. “Anyway, the Voice did not lead us to the mage we sought, or even to itself. It led us to N’Doch and Lady Water.” She was shamed by the awkward formality that tied her tongue in knots. But soon the tale took hold, telling itself of its own accord. “We were in a place called Africa, so fantastical and strange that I grew at last to believe N’Doch’s assertions that the dragon had transported us not only in location, but in time.”
“2013, no doubt of it,” N’Doch put in. “Eleven hundred years from now. When I laid eyes on these two, I was sure they were some kind of special effect. Took me a real long time to figure it otherwise.”
2013. Amazed by the thought yet again, Erde translated for him, stumbling over the equivalent of “special effect.” Murmurs and headshakes ran around the table like a ritual response. “And then immediately, we were being pursued . . .”
“There’s always someone after my ass, y’see,” explained N’Doch.
“. . . but N’Doch took us to his grandfather Master Djawara, a great mage himself, though not the one we searched for.”
“Papa Dja’s no mage, whatever that is, but he’s witchy, all right.” N’Doch beamed his dark smile at Rose. “Like you ladies.”
“Master Djawara sent us to the city and Mistress Lealé, a dreamer and prophetess . . .”
“A scam artist, you mean.”
Erde bit back a pout. Perhaps she should just let N’Doch tell the story. The listeners around the table seemed to enjoy his posturing, his willingness to try for a laugh even with his own dignity at stake. Then she could sit back and translate his exaggerations and embellishments, at least as directly as she could bear to without blushing, or worrying that his boasting was reflecting poorly on her. But the dragon in the barn had an opinion about that.
ALL SIDES OF THIS TALE MUST BE TOLD. IT IS MORE THAN JUST AN ADVENTURE STORY.
Erde agreed. She saw Hal warming to N’Doch’s colorful description of the escape into the bush, questioning him directly in Frankish and eagerly sharing out his replies. She cleared her throat once more and gently interrupted. “And, remember, there at Mistress Lealé’s, we uncovered the first hints that the Summoner might be the dragons’ elder sister Air, and that the Summons might be a call for help.”
Water-as-Sedou had listened quietly from the start, but now he caught Erde’s eye. Relieved, she let him take over. With Sedou, there was no need to translate or worry that the proper telling of the tale would get sidetracked. And when he spoke, the entire room quietened.
“There is much,” he began in a voice like the tolling of bass bells, “that the dragons did not remember when they were waked from their long sleep, my brother Earth from under the mountain, myself from beneath the sea. So suddenly awake, so engendered by urgency and purpose, yet ignorant of how or why to put it to use. But memory returns.” Sedou wet his lips and surveyed his listeners gravely. “You have heard our sister Air mentioned. But there is yet another: our brother Fire.”
“Four!” Hal exclaimed softly. “Of course there would be.”
“Indeed, Sir Knight. You perceive the symmetry. But the symmetry is incomplete. Our sister Air is nowhere to be found. Were all in balance, there would be no need for dragon to be seeking dragon. We’d be four and already about the task we were awakened to accomplish.”
“You’ve discovered the Task, then?” Hal asked hopefully.
Sedou shook his head. “This knowledge requires a four-way understanding. No one of us is sufficient unto herself.”
“And what of Lord Fire? Do you know his whereabouts?”
Sedou paused, and Erde strained to pick up the brief dragon-to-dragon conference, too fast for her human senses. “We have hints. Worst of all, we . . . that is, some of us suspect him of working against us.”
Hal frowned, made a small sound of protest.
“Hear me out, Sir Knight.”
At this point, the tale caught even Baron Köthen’s attention. His bowed head, bronzed with firelight, lifted and turned ever so slightly in their direction. Erde watched his listening profile and thought she’d never seen anything more beautiful. Except, of course, the dragon Earth. She had not included her dreams in the telling, though the dragon encouraged her to. She could not bear to put the baron through that, to make him relive his humiliation in front of all these eager listeners. So she sat silently and let Sedou unwind the story of their time in Lealé’s mansion, of the fighting in the city outside, and Kenzo Baraga’s treachery. There was little she could add. The dragons knew better how those final bloody minutes had fallen out. N’Doch listened silently as well, curling and uncurling his fists as if amazed to find them on his wrists and still working.
A long silence followed Sedou’s finish, broken only by the snap of flames in the grate.
Then Hal said to Rose, “He was dead when he came to you? Truly?”
Rose tilted her chin at Linden, several places down the table. Linden nodded. All eyes turned to N’Doch, who grinned uncomfortably, though he usually loved an audience.
“Wonderful,” murmured Hal. “Wonderful.”
Captain Wender shook his head. He poured himself a half-mug of ale, then only sipped at it gingerly, as if working to keep himself from draining it in a single gulp. “You could find yourself an honored place at any hearth in the land with a tale like that.”
“Those that are left standing,” added Hal with a hollow chuckle. “But now, what of the task ahead?”
Sedou sat back. “Our journey has just begun, Sir Knight. Now that our company is rested and recovered, we must be on our way to find our brother Fire, and quickly, for it seems that only he can lead us to our sister Air.”
“Told ya,” N’Doch murmured.
Erde looked at him sidelong. Earth had also said as much when she’d gone to him for comfort in the barn. The urge that drove these dragons was their sole reason for existence. It could be put aside no longer. Their time of peace and safety was at an end.
“We are correct to understand that the dragon Fire is implicated in this treachery?”
Erde had to glance down the table to assure herself that it was indeed Baron Köthen who had spoken. He was toying with his empty wine cup and meeting no one’s eyes. It was as if he’d spoken to himself. Then he looked up at Hal. “He sounds like the sort of dragon you always swore was a slanderous myth invented by fearful churchmen, my knight.”
“I’m sure we’ve misunderstood about Lord Fire,” Hal began.
“Not at all.” Sedou turned to Köthen, a long look down the table, as if noticing him for the first time. “You are right, my lord baron, though there is some difference of opinion about this within our ranks. My brother Earth wishes me to note that he is not yet convinced of Fire’s betrayal.”
“Betrayal? Impossible!” cried Hal. “A misunderstanding, surely! Dragons are all that is good and noble in God’s creation!”
Erde recalled her own shock and disbelief when Lady Water first suggested that Fire might be out to destroy them. N’Doch murmured something filthy and cynical that she refused to translate, and Sedou laughed, a bass rumble felt in the back of the throat, a laugh no true human could have produced. “Would that were true, Sir Knight.”
Köthen filled his wine cup and drained it. “You do persist, Heinrich, in believing in what other men have given up on long ago.”
“Oh, really?” Hal retorted. “I believed in dragons, and lo . . .” Sedou restrained him with a big hand on his arm.
In the pause, Köthen looked up, found the dark man watching him, and looked away. The wine cup made several revolutions in his restless hands. Finally, he asked, “And how do you expect to locate this paragon of evil?”
“There is a way we travel, a kind of translation through time and space that is enabled by the identity of place. And so, with my brother Fire: we have an image in mind of where he is, or in N’Doch’s mind actually, as it’s he who received it. We won’t know where it really is until we get there. But he will be there. I am sure of it.”
Köthen stared at him. Erde could see he had not expected so direct and technical an answer. “You can go anywhere you like?”
“If we can see it clearly, we can go there.”
“How long will it take?”
“No time at all, my lord baron. The travel is instantaneous.”
“Magic,” Wender muttered, and crossed himself covertly.
Köthen’s eyes flicked to Hal. “You’ve traveled like this?”
“I have, yes.”
“Let me guess: from Erfurt.”
“And to Erfurt. How did you think I got in without you knowing in the first place? You had that town guarded like the king’s own storehouse.”
Köthen looked back to Sedou. Some part of this had snagged his interest. “And so, you’ll just go?”
Sedou nodded. Köthen let out a breath. Erde saw a bright, quick moment pass between them, man and dragon, an exchange: the envy in Köthen’s eyes for the challenge in Sedou’s.
But Köthen turned away and refilled his wine cup to the brim. “Well, Heinrich, as usual you’re right. I’ve been a fool all these years. A fool to believe in the nobility and strivings of mere men. What’s the point? Let’s stop this war right now. We’ll just let these dragons rule the kingdom. How do you think Fra Guill would feel about that?” He drained the cup and reached again for the jug.
“Dragons do not meddle in the affairs of men, my lord baron,” Sedou said quietly.
Köthen laughed bitterly. “They seem to have meddled in mine fairly thoroughly.”
Oddly, Sedou smiled. “That is your fault for being at the center of things.”
The baron eyed him suspiciously.
“When there is something larger at stake, we will do what we must.”
“Since men live in the world, Dolph,” said Rose, as if waking from a deep reverie, “they will be threatened when it is threatened.”
“The world?” Köthen scoffed. “My lady Rose, I’d never have suspected you of apocalyptic thinking.”
Sedou said, “Were it not the case, I’d still be peacefully sleeping in the ocean depths, and my brother Earth beneath the mountains of Tor Alte. Do you think, my lord baron, that dragons are awakened for no purpose?”
Köthen merely stared at him.
You’re asking too much, Erde thought. Too much for him to absorb in the turn of one day. Too much to believe. For this man understands the consequences of belief. Good Captain Wender, in the corner, can just shake his head in wonder and then accept that there are indeed dragons in the world, just as his grandmama always said there were. But this man cannot just accept. He has an inkling of how profoundly all his definitions of the world will change, and he’s not ready for that. No more than I was, she mused, when N’Doch tried to explain his world to me.
And indeed, Köthen poured himself more wine yet again, then stood and shoved back his chair. He swayed, steadied himself with a brace of fingers to the tabletop. “We’re fools to listen to all this.” He shoved back from the table and strode across the room to stare out of the window into snow and darkness.
“He’ll come around,” Hal murmured.
No, he won’t, Erde thought, though she loved Sir Hal for his steadfast belief in this man whom he’d raised and trained and who had eventually betrayed him. But Adolphus of Köthen wouldn’t simply “come around.” It would take something drastic. But, oh, she thought rapturously, if that thing should happen, what a boon to have his skills and intelligence turned to our problem.
With Köthen gone from the table, Hal turned his attention back to Sedou, with the next in his scholar’s lifetime list of questions he’d always wanted to ask a dragon. Erde could see he was overjoyed to have one he could speak to directly, and since this one was likely to leave soon, Hal wasn’t going to waste any more precious time on his wayward ex-squire than was absolutely necessary. Erde hoped Sedou would be patient with him.
The women of the household began to drift off to bed. Beside her, N’Doch stirred. He’d been very quiet for a long time, she’d noticed. How very unlike him.
“So. Looks like we’re outa here.”
She nodded. The rising tide of dragon urgency was growing irresistible, as if the telling of the tale had completed some necessary ritual, and there was no reason left to linger. Time to be about their business. “When, do you think?”
“Soon.”
“Are you ready? I mean, are you truly healed, N’Doch?”
He smiled at her, one of the things Erde had to admit he did best. Like Sedou, and even their grandfather, Master Djawara. This family had a smile that could light up the darkest corners of a room. But she thought that this particular smile was rather overstretched with bravado.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“Of course it does.”
“Not to them.”
She knew he meant the dragons. “Oh, N’Doch, not true, not true.”
He shrugged. “Well, anyway, I’m fine. I’m better than ever, and as ready as I’ll ever be. How ’bout you?”
She felt very close to him right then. Her own rush of fellowship surprised her. For all his ignorance of the lore, there was so much that only he knew, only he understood—with her—about this business of belonging to dragons.
“You had all those brothers, N’Doch. Did . . . do you have any sisters?”
“Nah.”
“Well, you have one now.” She laid her pale hand beside his dark one. “We are like night and day, you see? Each one a half. Together we form the whole.”
This time, his smile was genuine.
She woke in her upstairs room in the darkened farmhouse from a dream she could not remember, and for that, she was grateful. She listened, first inside her head, in case it was the dragon sending a dream-image to wake her for some emergency. But the part of her consciousness that the dragon normally occupied was empty and still. He must be out hunting, a final meal before their impending departure. Then she heard a noise down below. Her little room was near the staircase, and sound floated freely upward. Someone was moving around in the lower room.
Erde got up quietly, more curious than afraid. The women of Deep Moor did not roam their halls at night unless something was the matter. The room was freezing. The fire in the tiny grate had burned out long ago. She pulled her prentice boy’s linen shirt over her shift and hauled on her woolen leggings. For silence, she kept her feet bare. In the other narrow bed, the twins remained wrapped in the quiet sleep of the guiltless.
She slipped into the corridor and down the stair, stopping at each landing to listen. Whoever it was did not care if he or she was detected. She turned onto the final run of stairs. From there, she had a view of the front part of the great room and the fireplace.
Captain Wender had stretched himself out in front of the dying coals, smothered in the thick quilts that the women had brought him. The unaccustomed warmth and wine and good company had clearly been too much for this valiant man-at-arms. He was fast asleep. A glimmer drew Erde’s attention away from him.
At the far end of the table, away from the fire, sat Adolphus of Köthen. Several wine cups and more than one stout jug were stationed beside his elbow, but he was not drinking now. He was staring at the gleaming blade of a dagger, turning it restlessly in his hands as he had done with his empty cup earlier. Wender’s dagger, no doubt surreptitiously lifted. He studied it as if it might speak to him, and then he did something that sent Erde’s heart pounding into her throat.
He set the dagger to the inside of his left wrist, made a fist, then pensively traced the raised blue lines of his veins with the blade’s keen point. Erde was down the stairs and confronting him across the table before she’d even thought about what she was doing.
“Oh, no, my lord, never!”
His eyes flicked up at her, startled. Erde drew back. She hadn’t recalled there being so much darkness in them.
“Why the hell not?”
He said it so bleakly, she could not immediately reply. There was little trace of the rage he’d first greeted her with in the barn. He was drunk for sure, but in that state beyond mere loss of sobriety, where clarity returns with a focus as sharp as a lance. Erde saw the signs. She knew them all from dealing with her father, who drank hoping to forget but only ended up remembering more than he ever did when he was sober.
“Please, my lord . . . you’ve had too much,” she said inanely, because she had to say something.
“Clever girl.”
“I mean, one should never heed a decision made under the drink’s influence.”
Köthen laughed softly. “You mean, I might live to regret it? No, my lady Erde, my hand is steady, drunk or sober.” He dragged the dagger back along his wrist, then shifted his grip and pulled, letting the edge bite. Blood flowed along the path of the slice.
“NO!” Erde threw herself against the table, flinging her arms across to snatch at the blade and pull it away from his skin. Köthen jerked the blade from her grasp, then swore and tossed it aside to grab her hands and peel them open. Blood welled up in her own palms. The rush of it frightened her.
“Make fists and hold them,” he ordered tartly. Suddenly, he sounded cold sober. In the next instant, he was on his feet and rummaging through one of the satchels the twins had brought in from the packhorse. All he could find was the same length of soft red cloth that had bound his wrists on the way into the farmstead. “A better use for it anyway,” he muttered, tearing it cleanly in half with his teeth. He came back to the table and wound a strip tightly around each of her bleeding palms. “Surface wounds. They won’t scar.”
As if she cared. Already, he’d forgotten his own wound, a thin red line become mostly an ugly smear on his wrist, drying up already. Hardly a wound at all. He had been playing with her. When he was done wrapping, he slumped back against his chair and fixed her with that too-dark stare.
“You seem, my lady, to have a compulsion to keep me alive, even when it is not in my own best interests. Do I dare ask why?”
Her heart was too full to even speak.
He tilted his head speculatively. “Perhaps you have some witchy purpose for me? There’s been a great deal of talk about purpose this evening, and as I seem to have lost mine . . .”
“My lord baron, I am not a witch.”
“Then what are you?”
“A girl. I’m just a girl.”
“Who talks to dragons and travels to times that haven’t happened yet and whispers in a man’s ear at night when he’s about to make a fateful decision. Just a girl?”
To Erde’s surprise, he let her reach for the dragger and draw it away from him into her own hands. She folded her wrapped palms over the blade. “Very well, then. I am a dragon guide.”
He settled back a bit more. “Go on.”
“That is no witchery. It is a silent, holy duty passed down through countless generations of blood from the earliest times, so that one would always be ready, should the need arise.”
“The need?”
“The waking of the dragons, which is the dire sign. The actual need we have yet to determine.” She dared to look up at him, to meet his steady, noncommittal gaze. “May I show you something?” He merely shrugged, but she reached beneath her mismatched layers of linen for the treasure she always kept pinned next to her skin. She undid the clasp and laid the brooch before him on her red-wrapped palm. “See? My grandmother’s, and hers before that.”
Köthen leaned forward, squinting in the dim firelight, then reached for it. “If I may . . .?”
She held it out. He took it and rose, carrying it to the hearth to peer at the ancient blood-red jewel with its delicate incised carving of a dragon rampant. “It has wings,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know. I think it doesn’t stand for my dragon, but rather for the essence of dragon.”
“Or for what men think of dragons. It’s old, but not that old. Probably it was made as a reminder, a key to ancient memories.”
She smiled at him, though he wasn’t looking at her. This was the closest thing they’d yet had to a conversation. “My lord baron, I do believe that some of Sir Hal’s dragon study has rubbed off on you after all.” And then she could not believe she’d spoken to him so boldly.
But he only snorted, turning the jewel in his hands with the same intensity as he had the dagger. “He fed it to me with my morning porridge. How could I help it?”
“And yet you chose not to believe?”
“I chose not to, yes.”
“And now . . .?”
“Well, clearly I was wrong, as I have been about so many things of late.”
“No, my lord . . .”
“Yes.” He came back to the table and placed the dragon brooch deliberately in the center of her cushioned palm, then sat down and faced her directly. “How is it that you could speak to me in that clearing? That the priest could sense your presence? If not witchery, by some dragon magic, is it?”
“I don’t know, my lord. I had . . . dreams . . . several dreams, in which I saw you as clearly as I do now, in your camp on the battlefield, with my father, with Captain Wender and then with the . . .”
Köthen hissed, rose, and paced away. “Curse the day I made that unholy alliance. Greedy, too greedy, Adolphus!”
“Fra Guill has deep powers of his own, my lord. See how easily he cozened my father . . .”
“Your father is a drunken sot!” At the edge of the shadows, he stared up into the darkness of the stairwell. “Have you any notion what your witchery cost me, girl?”
“My lord, I am a baron’s daughter, and the granddaugter of a baroness. I think I know something of the ambitions of the courtier. And I never intended . . .”
“Courtier?” Köthen was appalled. He whirled on her, his fist raised and clenched. “I had a kingdom within my grasp!”
Erde stared at the red jewel in her hands so that her eyes would not stray to the litter of wine cups and empty jugs between them on the table. She did not see how she alone could be responsible for his loss. At some point he must have realized that the hell-priest would never have crowned him king. He was far too strong and able, not the hell-priest’s creature like her father. In truth, she understood little of courts and the lust for power. She had merely tried on some of N’Doch’s bravado. It did not fit very well, she decided.
Köthen took a breath, planted both palms on the table, and loomed over her. “Well, isn’t he? A drunken sot?”
Silently, she nodded. But her meek agreement seemed only to enrage him further. He snatched up all the wine cups on the table and hurled them into the fireplace. “I am not a drunk!”
The smash of crockery so close to his ear brought Captain Wender bolt upright out of his deep sleep. “What? My lord? Are we under attack?”
Köthen waved him back irritably. “No, Wender. Merely an accident. Go back to sleep. You’re better off.”
Wender shook the drowse from his head to survey the unfamiliar, darkened room. His eyes found Erde, and he cocked a scarred brow in inquiry. She nodded reassurance, then made the little hand sign that her father’s house guards always used to warn each other when the baron had been drinking. Which was, of course, most of the time. Wender’s lips twitched: a faint, complicit, admiring grin was born and died before it could give both of them away. He nodded and lay back in his nest of blankets and seemed to be instantly asleep again. But Erde was sure he would not be so caught by surprise again that night.
Köthen observed the end of this exchange, and it was not lost on him. But he also saw that she did not betray him to his man-at-arms by revealing the purloined dagger. He threw himself back into his chair, dropped his face into his hands, then dragged them roughly across his cheeks and beard with a ragged sigh. “Heinrich says I am past all reason. Do you agree?”
After a moment of consideration, she replied recklessly, “Yes, my lord.”
Köthen laughed, a short, bitter sound, more of a bark than an expression of mirth. Then he folded his arms to lean forward on them and stare at her closely. “You are an earnest and well-brought-up child, I can see that much, despite your fool of a father . . .”
“I beg you, my lord . . .”
“A thousand pardons, my lady, for my intemperance. I meant . . . your honored parent, Josef von Alte.”
“I am grateful, my lord.” Let him be as ironical as he pleased. She had his attention at last and perhaps, as her father often did, he would talk himself to sleep, and then there would be no more threats of a blade to the wrists, at least, not this night.
“And for these virtues I credit your noble grandmother, may she rest in peace.”
To hear him speak of her beloved grandmother nearly broke her resolve to remain tearless. “Did you know her, my lord?”
“Aye. As loyal a subject of the King as ever there was.” He paused, then grinned sourly. “Plotted against her many times.”
Erde glanced up at him, alarmed. For a moment, his dark eyes softened inexplicably. So sad, she thought, almost tender. But not for me. For his gentled gaze was directed somewhere inside his own head, at some memory, perhaps, some personal musing. Yet he seemed to be looking at her when he said quietly, “I believe that you did mean me well, for I see that you are incapable of meaning ill. How enviable.”
She sensed the direction of his thoughts, turned against himself as keenly as the dagger’s blade. It would do no good to protest that she had mean thoughts every day, about her fellow dragon guide, for instance, and certainly about the evil priest.
“And therefore,” Köthen continued, one hand fitfully massaging his brow. “You will think it most immodest of me, most unbecoming in a good Christian man, when you hear me say that the kingdom has need of me.” He regarded her speculatively, as if trying to decide if he could talk to her as an aware adult. “My lady Erde. Ours is a land in crisis. The peerage is slothful and corrupt. Their people have lost all faith in the structures meant to protect them. Why else do you think the priest has won so many converts? He has nothing real to offer them. But this is a time of fear, not of faith. A strong, enlightened leader is needed, and I am the man for it. I could heal this sickness, if they’d let me. I know it, and Heinrich knows it, but he lets his infernal principles get in the way. Like you do, my lady. No wonder you’re such great friends.”
“A rightful monarchy is ordained by God, my lord.”
“Wrong!” Köthen slammed a fist against the table, causing Wender to mutter and turn over in his quilts. “That is a convenient fiction invented not too many generations ago to legitimize the current reigning family . . . Otto’s grandfather, who took the throne by force from some other sorry ‘rightful’ sot! As I hoped to do! When the weak rule, the strong must offer remedy! It’s traditional! Did the baroness not teach you history, child?”
“I am not a child, my lord.” But in her heart, she marveled at his magnificence, chin up, back straight, his eyes bright with the fire of conviction and righteous wrath. Here was the man she remembered from the barn in Erfurt. But it was a fleeting image.
“Not a witch, not a child . . . what are you, then? Oh, yes, I remember . . . a girl. You did tell me that, forgive me.”
Erde took two deep breaths and forced her shoulders away from their stranglehold about her neck. “I believe you wish me to think ill of you, my lord.”
“That’ll do for a start. Then maybe you’ll stop trying to save my life!”
“But it hasn’t been by choice, don’t you see?” Carefully, to hide her desperation, she balanced Wender’s knife between her bandaged hands. Only the absolute truth would do. “Except for just now, of course. After all, I hardly know you. My dreams were . . . I was called into them. I had no say in the matter.”
“Were you aware in the dreams?”
“Of course, but . . .”
“Then you could have dreamed some other outcome?”
“My lord, I don’t think so.” Even now, a plan was forming itself in her head. Erde felt she owed him at least a hint. “I suspect some larger purpose to all of this, my lord, in which we must both take part.”
The tension ran out of him like water. “Purpose? You’ve been listening to those dragons again. I have no purpose, remember?”
“Not so, my lord.”
“Ever so, my lady.” He reached for the wine jug nearest him, which turned out to be not yet empty. He upended it in a long, thirsty tavern swallow. Then he set it down, cradled between his palms, and eyed Erde with owlish challenge. “I am not a drunk, but I do wish to be drunk. Unless you have some better idea of what a useless man should do with his time.”
In fact, she did. And her plan was clearer now. Oh, it was reckless, so reckless. She couldn’t believe she was thinking of such a thing. But because she loved him—for whatever inexplicable reason, and now that she understood this—she had to try to help him. She had helped the dragon, after all, so lost and ignorant when she first found him. A dragon now magnificent with purpose, even if he was not always sure exactly what it was. As this man had been magnificent, and would be again.
But she said nothing of this to Köthen. She lowered her eyes and said, “Not I, my lord baron.”
Köthen shrugged, theatrical in his regret. “Then I guess it’s the jug for me. It’s a longer way to do one’s self in, but in the end, just as effective.”
Erde slid the dagger to the edge of the table and swept it into the folds of her shirt. She judged that the crisis had passed for the night, for this night at least. “In that case, my lord, I will leave you to your own devices.”
When she rose from the table, he seemed surprised that she did not intend to stay and joust with him for what remained of the night. She could see that, despite himself, and witch-girl or no, he found her interesting. Perhaps he’d even enjoyed her company. And that, to Erde, was one very large step forward.
One that left her trembling inwardly, as if she’d charged blindly out onto a precipice with no thought for how she might ever make her way back to solid ground. Walking back to the stairs and up them with composure and grace may have been the hardest thing she’d ever done.