King's Dragon

  AN EERIE LIGHT GLOWED AHEAD…

  an unearthly presence. It grew closer, and broader, dispelling the fog as it went … but only around itself. Alain smelled spring blossoms and the fresh blood of slaughter.

  A rider approached. Armed in bright mail, it guided its horse forward at a sedate walk, untroubled by the raging wind. Alain thought about running, but it was so brief a thought that it was ripped away on the air almost as quickly as it formed. Because he had to stare.

  The horse was beautiful, as white as untouched snow, almost blinding, and the woman—

  He could not have moved even if he had tried. She reined her warhorse in beside him. She shifted in the saddle to examine him. They stood in dead calm. Three strides beyond the storm raged around them.

  Her gaze was at once distant and utterly piercing. If her eyes had a color, he could not make it out. They seemed as black as a curse to him. He stared up at her, and a cold fear gripped his heart.

  “What must I pay you to ride to war?” she asked.

  Not knowing what else to do, he knelt. “Lady.” His voice was as hoarse as hers was resonant. “I am sworn to the church.”

  “Not in your heart,” she said. She drew her sword. “Serve me,” she said. “Serve me, Alain Henrisson, and I will spare the village.”

  “Who are you?” he whispered.

  “I am the Lady of Battles….”

  Other Novels by

  KATE ELLIOTT

  available from DAW Books

  Crown of Stars

  KING’S DRAGON

  PRINCE OF DOGS

  THE BURNING STONE

  CHILD OF FLAME

  THE GATHERING STORM

  IN THE RUINS

  CROWN OF STARS

  The Novels of the Jaran

  JARAN

  AN EARTHLY CROWN

  HIS CONQUERING SWORD

  THE LAW OF BECOMING

  &

  with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  Volume One of Crown of Stars

  King’s Dragon

  Kate Elliott

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

  SHEILA E. GILBERT

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  Copyright © 1997 by Katrina Elliott.

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-63978-8

  Cover art by Jody A. Lee.

  For color prints of Jody Lee’s paintings, please contact:

  The Cerridwen Enterprise

  P.O. Box 10161

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  Phone: 1-800-825-1281

  Map by Michael Gilbert.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1048.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin U.S.A.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Paperback Printing, February 1998

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  This book is lovingly dedicated to my sister,

  Ann Marie Rasmussen.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My thanks to Katharine Kerr for supplying me with a title when all seemed lost;

  to my husband, Jay Silverstein, for his continued support while he has himself been engaged in a great enterprise;

  to the Reverend Jeanne Reames Zimmerman, O.S.L., for her immense aid with matters classical and linguistic;

  to my sister, Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen, whose knowledge of the medieval milieu was invaluable;

  to Dr. John W. Bernhardt, whose lecture on itinerant kingship in Ottonian Germany inspired the setting;

  and to Widukind of Corvey, monk and historian, whose History of the Saxons—made accessible to me through a 1949 translation into English by Raymund F. Wood—spoke to me across a thousand years.

  Since this is a fantasy, many details borrowed from our Middle Ages—large and small—have been altered, but all mistakes are mine alone.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  THE MOTHERLESS CHILD

  I A Storm from the Sea

  II The Book of Secrets

  III Shadows from the Past

  IV The Treasure-House

  V The Inner Heart

  VI The City of Memory

  VII Leavetaking

  PART TWO

  THE DEEDS OF THE GREAT PRINCES

  VIII On The King’s Progress

  IX The Dragons

  X The Sin of Pride

  XI A Mouse’s Hunger

  XII Bloodheart

  XIII The Shadow of the Guivre

  XIV The Promise of Power

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  ON a hill surrounded on three sides by forest and on the fourth by the ruins of a fortress stood a ring of stones. They crowned the hill with stark beauty, like the bones of a castle buried so deeply in the soil that only the battlements of the tallest tower rose above the earth. It was said by some that chambers lay beneath the standing stones, rooms filled with treasure, with haunts, with creatures not of human form. It was said that passageways led out from these chambers like rivers stretching from a landlocked lake, leading from this hill across the land, even to the cold sea in the north, even to the great mountains far to the south.

  On the third day of the month of Avril, as afternoon faded into twilight and the full moon shone low in the darkening sky, a lone traveler made her way up through the tumbled stones of the old fortress. She wore leggings, a plain linen tunic, and sandals laced up to her knees, human clothing which she had become accustomed to here in this foreign land but not what she felt comfortable in. With a staff gripped in one hand and a small pouch tied to her belt, she negotiated the maze of walls as if she knew it by heart.

  The ruins lay on a gentle incline, stretching from the banks of a narrow river up to where the last wall, no taller than a year-old child, lay crumbling into the dirt and grass. The forest rose beyond. A single watch fire burned on the other side of the river, past the stumps of felled trees and fields newly burned for a spring planting of barley, marking the only village that lay within sight of the hill crowned by stones.

  The traveler paused before she stepped over the last wall of the fortress. She threw back her hood. Her hair was so pale it seemed to shine with a light of its own. She reached into the pouch and drew out a scrap of torn cloth, stained with red. With a grimace, she made to cast it to the ground, as if by throwing it away she would free herself from its binding power before she passed into the wild majesty of the stones.

  But she paused, cocking her head to one side, listening. And she cursed. She hesitated, and that moment was enough for the lead horseman to spot her.

  It was dusk, but her hair was bright and his eyes were young and keen, and he was looking for her.

  “Alia!” he cried. “Beloved!” Recklessly, he urged his horse forward, picking his way up through the fort. More riders appeared behind him. He paused, reining his mount aside, so men on foot, carrying torches, could catch up and guide him forward. He used only one hand on the reins. In his other arm he carried a bundle of cloth tucked against his chest.

  She winced away from the sight o
f that small burden. The vow she had made years ago, as humans measured time, seemed rash and ugly now. She had stood up in front of the assembled council and spoken boldly, but she had not known then what she would suffer in the world of men.

  Then her gaze caught on a banner. A battle-scarred man in a gold and black surcoat closed the gap between himself and the young prince. Upright and arrogant in the saddle, he held in one hand the dragon banner, symbol of the elite guards who protected the heir and by extension the kingdom itself: a black dragon coiled on a gold background; a cluster of seven brilliant stars studded the gold field above the dragon’s figure. She traced this constellation with her gaze to remind herself of what it stood for, the Crown of Stars worn by the ruler of the ancient Empire, half-forgotten now in the world of humankind but destined to return. It was for this she had made the sacrifice.

  By this time, aided by her hesitation, the young prince had pulled his horse up beside her. Torches threw wings of light over the ruins, and their heat surrounded her like a prison built with walls of fire.

  “Why did you follow me?” she asked. “You knew I intended to leave.”

  “How can you leave?” he demanded, like a child wailing against being abandoned. But he was so young, barely a man, only eighteen years old according to the calendars of this world. With an effort he schooled his expression to one of haughty disdain and tried a different path. “Surely you will stay until the child is a year or two old, so you might know that it lives and thrives.”

  “No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death.” She spoke without thinking.

  A murmur, like the breath of wind through a forest, passed through the assembled soldiers, those close enough to hear her prophesy whispering her words to those who stood farther away. The old soldier urged his horse forward to halt beside the young prince. The dragon banner lapped over the saddle, brushing the young man’s arm.

  At that moment, the bundle stirred. The baby woke, batting aside the swaddling with blind infant groping. She saw the black shock of hair that crowned the baby’s head, the tiny face and its open, staring eyes, as vivid as fine green jade, its skin that marked it as flesh of her flesh, a fine burnished bronze nothing like the northern pallor of the young prince’s complexion even where it was roughened by exposure to sun and wind. The tiny hand closed on a corner of the dragon banner, gripping it with infant strength. The men-at-arms pointed and exclaimed over this omen: The bastard child born of no human woman sensed its fate already, though it was not yet two months old.

  The prince turned his face away, not wanting to look. Instead, he carefully—so carefully!—handed the baby over to the old soldier, who gave the banner into another man’s hands in order to hold the infant. Then he dismounted, gestured to his men to move away, and faced her.

  “You care nothing for the child?”

  She did not look after the old soldier as he guided his horse to a patch of ground less racked with loose stone and sudden sharp drop-offs that might catch a horse unawares.

  “He is no longer mine.”

  “How can you say so? He is the most beautiful child I have ever seen!”

  “Only because he is yours!”

  “Yours as well!”

  “Not mine! I carried it inside me, gave birth to it, bled enough blood to cover the fields that surround the village we just passed through! Never mine, and never meant to be. Leave me, Henri.” She had never learned the eastern accent and still spoke his name as a Salian would. “I never promised you anything but the child. Let me go in peace.”

  The young man said nothing for a long time, or at least, not in words. He had an expressive face, but he was learning to control it. She wondered, watching him, what he wanted to say, and what he would say. When she had first met him a year ago, he’d always blurted out the first words that came to his tongue. Now, made heir by right of fertility, he was learning to think before he spoke.

  “I do not want to let you go,” he said at last. “By the invocation of your name, Alia, I beg you to stay with me.”

  “Alia is not my name, Henri. It is only what you call me.”

  “You aren’t well enough to go. You were so ill after the birth.”

  “I am well enough now.”

  “Then why did you come to me? Don’t you love me at all?” His voice broke on the last words and a moment later he caught himself and tensed, his face freezing into a mask of stone.

  That mask, she thought, will be the one he wears most often when he becomes king.

  She thought of telling him the truth, because she did not dislike him. He was still young, a little callow, but he had strength in him, and he was ambitious, and clever, and handsome in a human way, elegant and proud.

  But the truth was not hers to tell, nor his to know. King he might become, but he was only a pawn in hands whose power was greater than his would ever be as regnant of two kingdoms. She and he were both pawns, and this gave her some sympathy for him.

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. “I am not immune to human charms,” she lied. “But my duty lies elsewhere.” That at least was true.

  She could not bear to hear more from him. She could stay in this world no longer. It weighed too heavily on her; it had stolen so much of her precious blood. She fingered the scrap of bloody cloth, torn from the sheets in which she had given birth; it—and what it signified, her link to the child—was the last thing that bound her here. She let go of the bloody rag, and it fluttered to the ground.

  As he knelt to pick it up, she stepped across the last crumbling wall. He rose, calling after her, but he did not try to follow. Nor could she really hear his voice any longer as the stones rose up before her and she heard at last the faint music of their alignment singing to her.

  With her inner sight she touched the wind stone, the stone of light, the stone of blood, of water, of fire, the other stones, each according to its properties. Here, in the human world, in order to touch the heart of any object, to find and manipulate its essence, she had to trace winding paths around the walls and barriers built by human magi, for they chose to constrain and then master what they could not understand. But as she entered the precinct of stone, those walls fell away. She lifted a hand. Mist arises from the commingling of water and air, and so mist rose around her, at her suggestion, hiding her from view as she entered the ring of stones.

  Above her, unobscured by the mist that surrounded her, stars shone. She read their alignment and called down the power that sang from them and melded it to the alignment of the stones, each to each, a choir raising its voice to heaven. She called to the heart of her own land, and at the altar of fire and blood a portal opened.

  Neither a door nor a wispy shimmering of air, it looked like an arbor, a lush flowering vine grown over an arch. She smelled snow and felt the cold sting of a winter wind beyond. Without hesitation she stepped through and left the world of humankind behind.

  Prince Henry, heir to the kingdoms of Wendar and Varre, watched Alia walk away from him, up into the ring of stones. He steeled his face, his heart, his whole body, and when the mist rose and covered her, he simply tightened his hand on the scrap of cloth she had left behind that contained all he had left of her: her blood.

  Three of his men stood beside him, holding up torches to drive back the mist that had swollen suddenly from the ground, a night-crawling fog that surrounded the stones. Light flashed within the stone ring. A chill wind stung his lips. A perfect crystal flake of snow spiraled down on the last of the wind and dissolved on his boot. Mist still clung about the stones.

  “Shall we go up, my lord, and look for her?” asked one of his men.

  “No. She is gone.”

  He tucked the cloth into his belt and called for his horse. Mounted, he took the baby back into the crook of his arm and, with his entourage around him, began the slow descent of the hill. The baby did not cry, but its eyes were open, and it stared at the heavens, or at
its father, or at the dragon banner. Who could tell?

  A breeze swelled out from the stones, and mist rolled down over the ruins from the height of the hill, swathing the crumbling buildings in a sudden thick fog and hiding the moon. The men picked their way carefully, men on foot grabbing hold of horses’ harnesses, the rest calling out to each other, marking distance by the sound of their voices.

  “You are better off without a woman like that,” said the old soldier suddenly to the prince in the tone of a man who has the right to give advice. “The church would never have accepted her. And she has power over the ways of nature which it were better not to meddle with.” The dragon banner hung limp, sodden with the weight of the fog, as if this unnatural mist was trying to drag the banner down.

  But the prince did not reply. He kept his gaze on the torches surrounding him, like watch fires, light thrown against the gloom.

  A ring of seven candles, light thrown against the gloom.

  Watchers stared into a mist that rose from a huge block of obsidian set in their midst. Their faces were hidden by darkness.

  In the mist they saw tiny figures, a young nobleman carrying an infant, ringed by his faithful followers. Slowly these figures descended through a fortress, seen half as ruins, half as the ghost of the fortress that was once whole. The tiny figures walked through walls as if they were air, for they were air, and it was only the memory of what was once there, in the minds of some few of the watchers, that created the ghostly walls, the suggestion of the past built anew.

  “We must kill the child,” said one of the watchers as the mist faded, sinking into the black stone. With it faded the image of the prince and his retinue.

  “The child is too well protected,” said a second.

  “We must attempt it, for they intend to shatter the world itself.”

  The first among the watchers shifted, and the others, who had been whispering among themselves, stilled into an uncanny silence.

  “It is never wise to seek only to destroy,” said she who sat first among them. Her voice was rich and deep. “That way lies ruin only. That way lies darkness.”