The child and the dragon

Many paths ran through the forest, but only one connected the northern capital to the front lines in the South. A few paces across, and once well-trodden, it now sprouted saplings and saw more animal than human traffic. People had learned the dangers of using such open routes.

At a place where the road diverged around an ancient grove, it opened into what might have been a meeting place. Log benches, overgrown with creeping plants and moss, ringed the circle. A solitary child with flaming red hair, dressed in coarse trousers and a hooded smock, slept on a rough blanket between the thick roots of the old oak that marked the dividing point. When an adult dragon crashed through the forest canopy, provoking a chorus of thrashing wings, caws and squawks from indignant birds, the child didn't stir. The great dragon, grizzled and scarred with age and battle, landed with a tree-shaking thud no more than a hundred paces up the wide path, but the child showed no signs of waking.

The dragon had watched this place, knowing the fugitives might pass through it. They were adults though, and it caught only the child's scent - the child they had taken and now seemed to have abandoned. Were it not for many months without sleep, the dragon might have hesitated longer, but it was the child it wanted. The others meant nothing. It paced forward, slowly at first but gaining speed, and had covered half the distance before the first projectile struck, flying out from between the trees to explode on the bony scales of its face. A thick, oily cloud of green vapour spread out around its head.

The dragon stumbled, shaking its head to escape the cloying gas. More projectiles shattered on its head until there was nothing to be seen but a noxious cloud at the end of its neck. The humans moved out from cover with lifted bows and rotating slings. All were plastered head to foot with thick mud and rotting leaves. One woman sprinted across the space to snatch up the child and disappeared back into the forest. The blinded and choking dragon reared up, unfurling its great wings and pushing out its chest as if preparing to disgorge a gout of annihilating fire. Instead, it choked and gasped, then blew great streams of the green gas out of its nostrils before collapsing forwards, falling onto the elbows of its wings and wheezing like an asthmatic.

"Harpoon, now!" one of the attackers shouted. A viciously barbed iron spike shot out past the old oak, trailing a thick rope. The dragon twisted, the crude spike scored its flesh but skittered off the diamond-hard ribs beneath. It lashed out blindly, narrowly missing one of the men and cutting through a stately ash as if it were a reed, sending it crashing down. Clambering over the fallen tree, the dragon lurched into the meeting place, flapped its wings once, twice, and careened off through the canopy, sending broken branches and leaves spinning. Then it was gone, leaving a thin trail of green smoke behind it.

Curses and shouts of recrimination rang out.

"God's teeth, we almost had it!"

"How could you miss it, Jotun? It was right there!"

"I had it fixed at the right spot. Someone fired too soon”

Jotun's voice was measured, not angry. The ballista was anchored to shoot as the dragon bent over the child and could not be easily re-aimed like a bow.

"Who fired that first arrow, then?" a young man asked.

"Who do you think?" one of the women replied. All of them looked towards a tall man with a short beard who was unstringing his longbow.

"You need to speak with her, Bren," one of the women said.

"If you don't one of us will," said the man who had been standing by the ash tree. His face was pale, and he looked shaken.

"I will," Bren said. "But right now, we need to leave. That dragon might have to clear its lungs, but it'll be back. Split and take different paths, we'll regroup at the old mill"

The group gathered the harpoon and rope and dismantled the field ballista. Two pairs of women set off in different directions as Jotun and Brek, a big, burly fellow taller than all the rest, loaded the parts of the ballista onto a small cart. The man called Bren walked away from the activity to where the woman, Kyra, stood, still holding the boy. With her was an older man, much older than any of the others, draped in a body-length hooded garment that appeared to have been made from dried grasses and herbs, woven and rolled into a thin felt.

Bren, like Kyra, came from a peaceful fiefdom of rolling foothills and alpine peaks to the North. The smell of the old man’s garment, which he never seemed to remove, reminded Bren of the meadow hay gathered in his father’s barns before everything was burned. Despite all that had happened since the smell calmed him.

As he approached, Kyra looked up, her face twisted in anger

"No more milk of the poppy! No more! Do you hear? Look at him, he's not just asleep, he's barely breathing. Are we dragon killers, or murderers of children?"

The child, a boy of perhaps three years old, lay across her arms, his face pale and slack.

"Do you think it would have kept still, without a good dose? It might have warned the dragon, then none of us would be breathing," Bren said. His fists were tightly clenched, but his voice remained level. "More importantly, Kyra, you broke discipline. We would have had that beast if you hadn't fired so soon"

"And it might have taken the boy if I hadn't! It was nearly upon him! Using the boy as bait is not a trick that will work twice. So no more dosing, the poppy milk'll kill him," she retorted. She lay the boy down on the rough blanket and neatly folded it around him into a sling, which she then slung, with the boy in it, across her back, tying it in the front. She fixed Bren with a stare. "And it's he, not it. The boy is as human as you or I, though you refuse to accept it"

Jotun made the sign of the cross but said nothing. A moment of silence stretched out. The older man cleared his throat.

"The boy has always been obedient", he said.

"I understand that you have both grown attached to - him, Arstan". He paused, then spread his arms, palms out. "Arstan, Kyra, how many years have we fought together? We all know who the enemy is, and yet today, because of your indiscipline, Kyra, we let one of them fly free. How many more will it kill? You cannot expect the others to stand for that, not without some guarantee it won't happen again" he lowered his voice and leaned closer to the other two. "You have both shown your courage many times, no-one would dispute that. But some are beginning to see you as traitors to your own kind, no better than the mercenaries and cultists who fight with the dragons"

Kyra stiffened at these words but wouldn't meet Bren's eyes.

"Bren, the prophecy..." Arstan began. Bren raised a hand to cut him off

"Arstan, old friend, this is not the time to discuss it. Will you go with Kyra?"

The old man nodded. He bent to pick up a sack that clinked with the sound of pans knocking together.

"Regroup at the old mill it is, then?" said Kyra, arranging her unstrung bow, so it hung under the sleeping child.

Bren nodded. "We will speak more there, Kyra. We cannot allow this…this child to divide us. You know as well as I do the boy is something more than human, though you refuse to admit it. Take the path ahead of Jotun and Brek, you can set up camp for them"

Kyra nodded curtly, conferred briefly with the two-man ballista team and set off, followed by Arstan along a path just wide enough for the cart the two men would follow with.

"Next time we're bringing the goat. Smell or no smell," the big man called Brek said as he took up the cart's two arms and moved off in the same direction. Jotun followed, and Bren set off along another path alone.

***

Hauling the unwieldy weapon in its cart along the narrow path was difficult work, and both men cursed the ballista, the decision not to bring along the goat they used to pull it, both the king and the dragons for the ongoing war, their own luck at being born at such a time - and Kyra. Kyra, whose overweening concern for the boy had cost them a fair shot at the old dragon, the reason they had carted the weapon through the forest in the first place.

A full watch ahead of them, Kyra and Arstan made camp in a secluded spot where a landslip had formed a natural hollow. By the time the two exhausted men arrived, they had set snares, got a fire going, and Arstan had cooked up a panful of mushrooms and wild garlic in rendered pork fat, seasoned with the mix of rock salt and spices he always carried with him.

The boy had come out of his stupor on the trail, but Kyra, deep in conversation with Arstan about the day's events, had not noticed that he was sitting alarmingly close to the fire, poking into the hottest part of it with a stick. Brek, arriving with the cart, looked straight at the boy and cursed out loud.

“Damnation, woman, that thing is mocking us!”

He roared, dropping the arms of the cart and wiping sweat from his face with one meaty forearm. The boy’s flaming orange eyes looked up in mild surprise as Kyra scurried over and gently drew him back from the fire. His rough garment was so hot it scorched her fingers, but for the sake of the boy, she neither let the pain show nor said anything in his defence. Speaking with Arstan had cooled her anger over how the boy was treated, and she was not unaware of the growing disquiet within their group. Anger and suspicion over the child had boiled over many times since they had broken through enemy lines and found him in one of the camps where those fighting for the dragons rested on rotation. There Kyra had defended him from Brek and had again many times since. It seemed to her that such incidents were creating a momentum of their own and that she would not be able to protect the boy for much longer.

“Come, sit, eat”, Arstan called out, placing himself between the two men and the child. Pan in hand, he produced two simple wooden spoons from under his rustling garment and, putting the pan on a flat rock put there for the purpose, handed the spoons to Jotun and Brek. They ate in sullen silence. Brek didn't stop staring at the boy.

Arstan sat down next to the two men and gathered his long garment around him.

"Is it good?"

The two men nodded mechanically and kept eating.

"Very good", Jotun managed.

"At my age, even gathering mushrooms is a challenge. I do like good chanterelles though. Always worth the effort"

The two men continued to eat in silence.

“Bren may have told you, he is convening the war council”

“He did not”, replied Brek, still staring at the boy.

“Clearly you, and others of course, are unhappy with the boy’s presence” Arstan continued. “It is of course a matter that must be addressed - in the proper way”

Brek turned to look at him, and Arstan held his gaze until the big man blinked and gave a slight nod.

Arstan clapped his hands together “Now, you two must sleep, regain your strength. Kyra and I will divide the watches between us”, he said

“What happened today, that needs to be brought up too,” Brek said, his hostile gaze moving to Kyra. “There needs to be an accounting”

“Of course, of course,” the older man said.

As the others slept, Kyra and Arstan spoke in fierce whispers, sitting by the fire with their heads close together. When one of the sleeping men stirred, they got up and moved out to the edge of the hollow to continue their conversation in low voices.

"Kyra, I believe the prophecy," Arstan said. "I'm not saying the dragons are to be trusted, but what reason would they have to speak of such things, if they did not believe them?" He looked over to where the boy lay asleep. "The child of flame? Who can it be but him?" He took Kyra's hands in his own "if he is the child of the prophecy, then no harm will come to him"

"I'm afraid," Kyra said. "Afraid for the boy. I've seen what people can do. I've never seen the words of a prophecy or anything else prevent harm to the innocent"

"What happened to your brother was unjust, Kyra. We all know that. But that doesn't mean the boy will suffer the same fate"

"Use his name, Arstan. The others may refuse to allow him a human name, but you at least should use it"

Arstan nodded

"I don't believe Kyle will come to harm, but if you feel you must leave, then leave you must"

"I'll wait until Brek and Jotun have left. We can tell them we'll take the old path, over the pass, they'll need to take the lower path, with that cart. You must tell them at the mill that I said nothing about leaving, that I went ahead with the boy on the path, you couldn't keep up, and then I was gone"

"Ach, don't concern yourself. I know how to handle the council"

***

The morning revealed two rabbits caught in snares, and the men woke up to the smell of them cooking over the fire. They nodded their appreciation to Kyra as she portioned out the cooked meat but didn't meet her eyes.

As he ate, Brek stared across the fire to where Kyle picked at his smaller portion of the rabbit. Noticing this, Kyle stood up and offered the piece to Brek across the fire. Although the sleeve of his smock began to smoke in the rising heat, the skin of his hand did not redden, and he gave no sign he felt the flames at all. Brek stood up and flung his own food to the ground. He wiped the grease from his mouth with one forearm. Without taking his eyes off the boy, he said to Jotun

"Let's go. I'll not break fast with a demon"

Jotun at least acknowledged Kyra and Arstan with a nod before leaving.

I have no choice, Kyra thought. She gathered the remains of the cooked meat, scattered and doused the fire, then squatted down to speak with Kyle.

"We're going somewhere, Kyle, just you and I. Somewhere safe'

***

In the coming weeks and months, Kyle grew faster than she thought was normal for a child. Her younger brother, whom she had nursed and raised after their mother died soon after his birth, had not grown so quickly, she was sure. It was not long before he could walk for a full day.

Whenever Kyra encountered refugees, she kept the boy's face covered, claiming if asked that his eyes were dragon burned and he could not bear the sunlight. Under a deep hood, a scarf around his head revealed only a narrow slit of shadow. The boy never complained. It was why she protected him, perhaps. Her brother, now long dead, had been the same - taciturn, uncomplaining, withdrawn. She had decided the first time she saw those flaming eyes look up at her, she would allow no harm to come to him. She would take the boy to her uncle's old farm, far in the north.

Already they were far above the plains, and from where they sat among thinning trees above a steep escarpment, they could see only hills and forest dropping away toward the horizon. There were advantages to travelling with a group, mainly that among them, there were some who travelled with goats and so there was always milk and sometimes cheese to trade for, and other food-gathering resources could be pooled. If attacked by brigands, being part of a larger group might give her the opportunity to get away in the chaos. But she never stayed with any group for long.

The refugees hoped to be welcomed into the relative safety of the capital. Kyra kept her doubts about this to herself. She was sure the group would eventually pay a price for its lax security. Dragons and their followers might not often venture so far north, but the war gave opportunity to those eager to prey on the weak. She always slept on a knife edge, a bladed knuckle weapon on her clenched fist and the boy ready to be hoisted on her strong back.

On the night it happened, she was up and running with the boy's weight tight against her back and shoulders before the first screams ripped the night, alerted by some sense developed in years of fighting. She sprinted along the route she had paced out in daylight, away from their covered spot at the edge of the cliff, to an old oak she had seen growing where the earth had sunk or been washed away, forming a natural bowl littered with fallen trees. Too wet to camp in, it could provide a good place to hide until she could determine where the raiders were and sneak off.

When a bandit stepped out from the trees, paces ahead, she neither slowed nor swerved. In the moonlight, she could see his long arms, paunch and bandy legs.

"Leaving so soon?" The old bandit croaked and widened his arms to block the path. Kyra closed the gap between them, feigned right, left, then planted her right foot to one side of the old crook as he tried to grab her up. She swung her right arm in a hook and plunged the small blade of her hand weapon into the artery of his neck. She caught a glimpse of eyebrows raised in shock and felt a spray of hot blood, then she was away and running towards the tree.

She leapt over the first great root of the oak but slipped on the second. As she stumbled, an arrow whistled past. She turned, tripped backwards over another root and fell into the gap between that and the next. An unseen hole swallowed her headfirst. Her hands filled with wet clay as she tried to slow her descent and keep her weight off the boy, then her head crashed into something hard, and consciousness left her.

***

A throat-cracking thirst, a dull pain along the left side of her head, and the absence of Kyle's warmth across her back intruded on Kyra's awareness as she awoke. She tried to sit up and realised she was lying head downwards on a slope. She twisted around, slid, and ended up sitting with her feet on the flat floor of a cave. A dim bluish light emitted by lichen illuminated the space. To her right, small footprints, Kyle's footprints, led across the soft clay of the slope to the flat floor, where the traces disappeared. Kyra tried to call Kyle's name, but all that came out was a dry croak.

She sucked some water from where it ran down the walls in thin streams. She started in the direction Kyle's footprints indicated, feeling her way as the tunnel led into deeper darkness.

***

The arrival of the dragon, alighting on the edge of the escarpment close to where Kyra and Kyle had eaten the night before, barely disturbed the forest creatures scouring the abandoned camp. It picked up and followed the scent, pausing where the body of Kyra's attacker had fallen. The brigand's companions had hauled his body away, but the traces were as easy for the dragon to read. It saw how she fought to protect both herself and the child. Interesting.

***

"Kyle?" Kyra called out, her voice quavering but clear. She thought she could make out a dim glow in the tunnel ahead.

"I'm in here, mother"

Kyra gasped. It was Kyle's voice, no mistake, but never before had he called her mother. A sense of unreality crowded her as she stood in the dark. Had she fallen into the underworld? Was she dead? Was Kyle?

Countering fear with action, she felt her way to the next turn. There was indeed a glow of light, which became stronger as she navigated the next short passage, bending lower as the roof sloped down towards an exit less than half her height.

"Kyle?"

"Through here, mother," the voice replied.

She squeezed through the hole and entered a wider cave under a ceiling dense with hanging roots. Narrow beams of daylight shone through a man-sized hole close to the ceiling. On a rock in the middle of the chamber sat Kyle.

"You found me," he said, smiling. "It's just us here now, mother, but someone else is coming"

Kyra had the sensation of having walked into someone else's dream. This was Kyle, but where was the silent boy she knew? She walked over to him and stroked his red hair.

"Who is coming, Kyle?" she asked

"My other mother," Kyle said and beamed at her. "I think you will like her"

At that moment, a sound came through the exit hole, the sound that a cat might make landing if the cat weighed as much as a thousand anvils.

Kyra froze. Dark spots swam in front of her eyes. The tunnel, the tunnel they had slid down, they must climb back up it, must get away.

"Kyle, come with me" she reached out for his hand as he looked at her in puzzlement "now, Kyle, we have to go"

Reluctantly, he got down from the stone.

"But why?" he asked, then frowned as he saw how white her face was.

"We have to...we must..."

Kyra passed out.

***

As she woke, a scraping, clattering sound made Kyra think of the windmill on her father's farm. She pictured its slowly revolving arms as she came back to consciousness. From where she had fallen, the hole to the outside lay in her field of view. She could see something moving there, but at first, the light beaming down was too bright, and she couldn't make out what it was. Then her eyes adjusted, and she kicked herself backwards on her butt until her back hit the wall.

"Kyle, come here!"

The boy did, and she grabbed him, pulling him into an embrace.

The long fingers of the dragon's clawed hand felt their way over the rock surfaces bordering the narrow exit from the cave. Overwhelming exhaustion battled with Kyra’s impulse to run, resolving into an unsettling feeling of impotence as she watched the scaly hand grope and pull at the rock, testing its give. A scattering of dislodged earth and pebbles fell to the cave floor.

Cold spread through Kyra's muscles and into her bones as she sat, unmoving, until only where the boy's small body lay against hers was there any warmth. Dark grey talons, dull, scuffed, unclean but wickedly sharp, clacked on rock. Claws that could rake a man from neck to pelvis, cutting through armour, bone and muscle like a scythe through grass. She had no doubt the dragon could tear open an entrance for itself in moments. What held it back?

"A stalemate," The dragon spoke in a deep, sonorous voice that somehow soothed the ache in Kyra's head. "It seems I cannot widen the entrance without risking a roof collapse, Kyra"

Kyra stiffened at the sound of her name.

"Yes, I know who you are," it continued. "And I have no interest in harming you, and certainly not in harming the boy" Kyra heard the great creature shift as if it were settling into a more comfortable position for conversation.

The rhythm of its voice seemed to match the pulse of her beating heart.

"I remember you running to snatch up the child, after you fired one of those noxious darts of yours. A dragon does not forget. I remember the first of your kind, in fact. Hairy, smelly creatures, stumbling over the tundra as the ice began to withdraw. Long before you became so dangerous"

Kyra forced herself to focus. She'd seen how dragon speech could turn a person's mind, that voice like the warmth flowing out from the hearth on a night when the rain fell endlessly outside the walls, while inside, there was only warmth and peace.

"Tell me, Kyra, what do you want for the boy?"

Kyra’s eyes snapped open, and she tightened her arms about Kyle.

"To keep him safe"

"And how do you propose to do that?"

"He can stay with me," she said.

"And do what? Grow from a boy with those eyes, to a man with those eyes? Will you keep him in the cellar?"

Kyra had no response. A snuffling sound came from the hole above as if the dragon were trying to push its snout through.

"You know of the prophecy, yes?" it said. " To your kind such matters are a mystery. I have seen how your king's greybeards spread the guts of birds, imagining they can read something there, but they see nothing, they know nothing. We, though, we can read every waft and weave of this world. There’s no certainty about the future, but the broad strokes are there. This child can become king and bring an end to the war. We will return to our sleeping holes and you all may live as you choose"

"I will make you an offer, Kyra"

“I want nothing from you”

"Tell me how your brother died"

Kyra felt again as if this were all a dream.

"What?" was all she could manage.

"Then let me tell you. He was killed, was he not, by a petting lordling? Over some point of etiquette?"

"I will tell you nothing," Kyra yelled, fighting back a sob. She had been so proud of her brother and so fearful for him when he left to join the ranks of the king's men. Daniel, the brother she had raised from birth, had left with dreams of heroism in his heart. A flogging and a rope around his neck had found him for failing to make the proper obeisance to some minor royal. To make an example, she had been told, lest other peasants forget to show proper deference.

"You wish for vengeance?" the dragon's question hung in the air. Bitter tears ran down Kyra's face, but she kept her silence.

"You are so fractious, your kind. You call us beasts, but I have never known one dragon kill another, while you slaughter one another at the slightest provocation"

"We slaughter? Tell that to the cities you burned to ashes!”

The dragon’s laughter had a sinister edge to it.

"Poke a sleeping dragon...Think of it as a defence mechanism. There hasn't been much burning of settlements since that first year. Largely we leave you in peace. It's your king that insists on digging out the gold in our living spaces. It is your kind who keep the war going"

Kyra scoured her brain for a rejoinder.

"You've become cowards," she blurted, finally "you let men do your fighting"

"Cowards, is it?". The dragon chuckled. "If you are willing to fight over a little gold, we would be fools indeed not to let you kill each other, rather than us"

Another wave of shock washed through Kyra as the next words resounded not within the cave but inside her head.

"The boy cannot hear this, Kyra. You must divine how your choice will affect him. As I said, broad strokes - I told you of one possible future"

Kyle struggled in her arms. She let him go, and he stood, looking from her to the entrance and back.

"I have two things to offer you. One, come with me. Be the boy's carer. Watch him grow. Or, I can give you revenge. Find this popinjay who carries your brother's blood guilt. I could wipe out his entire family line if you wish. What will it be, Kyra?"

She looked at Kyle for a long moment. He looked back at her, his flaming eyes puzzled and concerned.

“Where you go, I go,” she said.

Kyle smiled back at her.

“I know”