Realm of Dragons

King Godwin turned to his son. He looked much as Godwin had at that age, muscled and powerful, though with a trace of his mother’s good looks and lighter hair to remind him of her now she was gone. He sat atop a charger, his armor inlaid with shining blue. He looked impatient at the prospect of being stuck there, doing nothing. Probably, when he’d heard that there was a dragon, he’d been hoping he might get to fight one. He was still young enough to think he could win against everything.

The knights around him waited patiently for their king’s instructions.

King Godwin knew there was only so much time they should be out. So close to the river, there was a risk of the southerners slipping across one of the bridges, and it was getting dark.

“Take too long and the queen will think we’re both trying to get out of the wedding preparations,” Rodry pointed out. “It will take us long enough to get back, even riding hard.”

There was that. With Lenore’s wedding just a week away, Aethe wasn’t likely to be forgiving about it, especially not if he was off with Rodry. Despite his efforts, she still thought that he favored his three sons by Illia over the three daughters she’d given him.

“We’ll get back soon enough,” King Godwin said. “First, though, we need to do something about this.” King Godwin glanced over to Grey before he continued. “If people hear about a dragon, let alone a dead dragon, they’ll think it’s an ill omen, and I’ll not have ill omens the week of Lenore’s wedding.”

“No, of course not,” Rodry said, looking ashamed that he hadn’t thought of it himself. “So what do we do?”

The king had already thought of that. He walked over to the villagers first, taking out what coin he had.

“You have my thanks for telling me about this,” he said, passing them the coins. “Now return to your homes and tell no one what you’ve seen. You were not here, this did not happen. If I hear otherwise…”

They took the unspoken threat, bowing hastily.

“Yes, my king,” one said, before they both hurried off.

“Now,” he said, turning to Rodry and the knights. “Ursus, you’re the strongest; let’s see how much strength you actually have. Fetch ropes, one of you, so we can all drag the beast.”

The largest of his knights nodded in approval, and all of them set to work, rooting through saddlebags until one came out with some thick ropes. Trust Twell the planner to have everything needed.

They tied the remains of the dragon, taking longer than King Godwin would have liked. The sheer bulk of the beast seemed to resist attempts to contain it, so that Jorin, ever the nimblest, had to clamber over the creature with a rope over his shoulders to tie it. He leapt down lightly, even in his armor. Eventually though, they got it lashed together. The king went down to them and took hold of the rope.

“Well?” he said to the others. “Do you think I’m going to haul this into the Slate by myself?”

There was a time when he might have, when he’d been as strong as Ursus, aye, or Rodry. Now though, he knew himself well enough to know when he needed help. The men there got the message and took the rope. King Godwin felt the moment when his son started to lend his strength to the effort, pushing at the dragon’s corpse from the far side, groaning with the effort.

Slowly, it started to move, leaving tracks in the dirt as they shifted its bulk. Only Grey didn’t add his efforts to the rope, and frankly they would have barely counted for much anyway. Step by step, the group of them got the dragon closer to the river.

Finally, they made it to the edge, getting it poised at the point where the ground fell away toward the river that was both the kingdom’s border and its defense. It sat there, so perfectly poised that a breath could have taken it over, briefly looking to King Godwin as if it were perched ready to fly out toward the southerners’ lands.

He set a boot against its flank and, with a cry of effort, kicked it over the edge.

“It’s done,” he said as it hit the water with a splash.

It didn’t disappear, though. Instead, it bobbed there, the sheer ferocity of the steel-gray waters enough to carry it away downstream, the dragon’s body bumping off rocks and twisting in the current. It was a current against which no man could swim, and against which even the dragon’s weight was a tiny thing. It was pulled down in the direction of the waiting sea, those dark waters rushing to join up with the greater body of them.

“Let us just hope that it hasn’t laid its clutch,” Grey murmured.

King Godwin stood there, too tired to question the man, watching the creature’s corpse until it was out of sight. He told himself that it was because he wanted to be sure it didn’t wash back into his kingdom, didn’t come back to cause trouble again. He told himself that he was just catching his breath, because he was hardly a young man anymore.

It wasn’t the truth, though. The truth was that he was worried. He’d ruled his kingdom a long time, and he’d never seen the likes of this before. For it to occur now, something was happening.

And King Godwin knew that, whatever it was, it was about to affect the whole kingdom.

CHAPTER TWO

Devin dreamed, finding himself in a place far beyond the forge where he worked, beyond even the city of Royalsport where he and his family lived. He dreamed often, and in his dreams, he could go anywhere, be anything. In his dreams, he could be the knight that he’d always wanted to be.

This dream was a strange one, though. For one thing, he knew that he was in a dream, where normally he didn’t. It meant that he could walk it, and it seemed to shift as he looked at it, letting him create landscapes around him.

It was as if he were floating over the kingdom. Down below he could see the land spread out beneath him, the north and the south, split by the Slate River, and Leveros, the monks’ isle, off to the east. In the far north, on the very fringes of the kingdom, five or six days’ ride away, he could see the volcanoes that had lain dormant for years. Far to the west, he could just spot the Third Continent, the one people talked of in whispers, in awe of the things that lived there.

It was a dream, yet it was, he knew, a remarkably accurate view of the kingdom.

Now he wasn’t above the world. Now he was in a dark space, and there was something in there with him: a shape that filled that space, the scent of it musty, dry, and reptilian. A flicker of light glimmered off scales, and in the half-dark, he thought he could hear the rustle of movement, along with breathing like bellows. In his dream, Devin could feel his fear rising, his hand closing around the hilt of a sword reflexively, lifting a blade of blue-black metal.

Great golden eyes opened in the dark, and another flicker of light came. By it, he could see a great, dark-scaled body on a scale he had never seen before, wings curled and mouth wide open to reveal a light within. Devin had a moment to realize that it was a flicker of flame coming from the creature’s mouth, and then there was nothing but flame, surrounding him, filling the world…

The flames gave way, and now he was sitting in a room whose walls formed a circle, like it was at the top of a tower. The place was filled from floor to ceiling with oddments that must have been collected from a dozen times and places; silk screens covered the walls, while there were brass objects on shelves that Devin couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of.

There was a man there, sitting cross-legged in a rare patch of open space, in a chalk circle surrounded by candles. He was bald and serious looking, his eyes fixed on Devin. He wore rich robes embroidered with sigils, and jewelry that embodied mystical patterns.

“Do you know me?” Devin asked as he got closer.

A long silence followed, one so long that Devin began to wonder if he had even asked the question.

“The stars said that if I waited here, in dreams, you would come,” the voice finally said. “The one who is to be.”

Devin realized then who this man was.

“You’re Master Grey, the king’s sorcerer.”

He swallowed at the thought of it. They said that this man had the power to see things that no sane man would want to; that he’d told the king the moment of his first wife’s death and everyone had laughed until the fainting fit had struck her, cracking her head on the stone of one of the bridges. They said that he could look into a man’s soul and draw out all he saw there.

The one who is to be.

What could that mean?

“You are Master Grey.”

“And you are the boy born on the most impossible of days. I have looked and looked, and you should not exist. But you do.”

Devin’s heart raced at the thought that the king’s sorcerer knew who he was. Why would a man like this take an interest in him?

And he knew, at that moment, that this was more than just a dream.

This was a meeting.

“What do you want from me?” Devin asked.

“Want?” The question seemed almost to catch the sorcerer by surprise, if anything could. “I merely wanted to see you for myself. To see you on the day that your life will change forever.”

Devin burned with questions, but in that moment, Master Grey reached down for one of the candles around him, snuffing it with two long fingers while he murmured something on the edge of hearing.