Crown of Renewal (Legend of Paksenarrion) (57 page)

From the safety of the dragon’s mouth, he watched as the fiery being came nearer yet; he could just see the outline of what might be bones within it as it matched speed with the dragon for a short time; then the dragon pulled ahead.

Camwyn did not mean to sleep, but he fell asleep on the dragon’s tongue, and when he woke, the dragon’s tongue was sliding out of its mouth onto grass. “Rise,” the dragon said.

He stood a little unsteadily and walked along the tongue until he could step off. The ground was firm under the grass; all around were
great rounded hills with outcrops of red rock. Most had clumps of trees here and there. He could just see the jagged tops of mountains beyond one hill. When he looked more carefully, he saw animals … large animals … grazing some distance away. One lifted its head, then another. Several moved toward him.

He thought he should know what they were … but he couldn’t think of the word until one of the animals whinnied and another broke into a trot. Horses. These were horses.

When he turned around again, the dragon had transformed once more into a human shape. “Come,” the dragon said, holding out his hand. “There is a place for you.”

They walked some distance; Camwyn had never been so far from a city and had no idea how far away things were. Around an arm of the nearest hill, the dragon led him along a path beside a creek, into a grove of trees, and finally to a low house built of stone. “Who lives here?” Camwyn asked.

“At this time, you do,” the dragon said. “You need to regain your strength. Here you have space and time to finish healing.”

“Alone?”

“Not … entirely. We will go inside.”

The small house seemed larger inside than it had looked outside. One large room with a table, a bench, several chairs. On the table, a cluster of dishes, pots, cooking tools … and a stack of papers and books. A fireplace at one end, and beside it a door into another, smaller room. In that room a narrow bed, and beneath it a pot.

“Sit here,” the dragon said. Camwyn sat down, glad to be off his aching legs. The dragon sat as well in his guise as man. “You will live here awhile, Camwyn, with no duties but to grow stronger and wiser. You will have food and water, and you will have instruction from those I send. For the first, eat well, drink deep of this water, which is pure and healthful, and walk about daily until your legs bear you without effort. Will you do these things?”

“Yes,” Camwyn said. He felt dazed and uncertain, but his mind had grasped the use and names of table, bench, chair, bed, dishes, and pots.

“Good.” The dragon stood, but when Camwyn stirred to rise, he
put out a hand. “Wait here. I will return shortly with someone who will help you.”

The room was cool and dim when the dragon left; Camwyn tried to order his thoughts, but they ran through his mind like … like sheep, he thought finally, with a vision of woolly backs flowing down a slope like water.

“Well, lad!”

A different voice. Camwyn jerked, having dozed off without realizing it. Before him stood an old man, one arm crooked, withered, the hand clenched into a nest of sticks, but with bright, unclouded eyes of green. “Sir,” he said out of a dry mouth.

“You’re my new neighbor,” the man said. “And hungry, I’ll wager.” He turned away and set something on the table with a thump. “I’ve bread, cheese, onions, sausages—enough for a start.” He looked back at Camwyn. “Been injured and sick, I hear. Need feeding up, the dragon said, and so you do. I’m Mathor—not a common name where you’re from, so dragon said. Never mind, it’s the name I came with. A fire, that’s what we need. A hot drink will do you good.”

Camwyn sat watching as the man bustled about, building a fire, fetching water in a pot, setting it to boil. From a leather pouch, the man took a handful of dried leaves and twigs and dropped them into the water as it heated. Camwyn’s nose remembered the smell as it steeped but not the name.

“Sib,” Mathor said, as if he knew Camwyn’s confusion. “Sib and a touch of something my gran knew.” He handed Camwyn a mug whose contents steamed.

Camwyn sipped; the flavor startled his tongue and seemed to clear his mind. “Sir,” he said. “Thank you.”

“There’s no sirring or lording between us,” Mathor said, but without heat. “You’re Camwyn, I’m told, and I’m Mathor.”

“Thank you … Mathor,” Camwyn said. The unspoken “sir” sat on the end of his tongue like a bur. He could assign it no meaning but custom.

“You finish that and I’ll have some food ready for you. Take a stroll outside if you like.”

He was outside with a mug in his hand before he knew it. Behind him the door closed, but he could hear Mathor humming to himself
inside. He looked around. Under the trees, wildflowers sprinkled the ground; the sound of the creek gurgling and splashing soothed his ears. A bench—he did not remember that bench—sat beside the house. He did not sit but moved toward the water, drawn by the sound.

Stones had been piled to make a low dam; behind it was a pool just larger than a bathing tub. Camwyn walked upstream to the dam and looked at the pool. Where it was not edged by rock, a fringe of mint and flowers surrounded it. As he watched, something wet and glistening threw itself off the dam into the water … his mind groped and came up with
frog
.

When Mathor called him back to a room filled with the smells of delicious food, Camwyn sat across the table from the man and ate eagerly. Mathor had opened shutters Camwyn hadn’t noticed before, letting light and air into both rooms. He showed Camwyn where the jacks was.

“The pool,” Camwyn said. “There’s a dam, and—”

“Oh, that pool.” Mathor nodded. “Looks the right size for a splash, doesn’t it? But that’s where I get the water. Splash there and you’ll have grit in your teeth when you drink. I’ll show you a place you can splash later—tomorrow maybe—but meantime, you’ll bathe from a tub.” He nodded across the room, and there was a wooden tub hanging from a spike in the wall. Camwyn didn’t remember it from before. “There’s water heating in the fire—” A tall ewer and buckets to fill the tub. Camwyn didn’t remember those, either.

He slept that night under blankets that had not been on the narrow bed when he first saw it, windows he had not seen either stood open to the night air, which Mathor pronounced healing. “This is a safe place,” he said as he left for his own place, one Camwyn had not seen. “Nothing here will harm you.”

Next morning Camwyn woke when something tickled his face. He opened his eyes to find a horse’s head hanging over his bed … a long milk-colored forelock and mane, bristly whiskers, a soft muzzle. After the first startled jerk, he lay still, fascinated. Was it a wild horse, like the others, or Mathor’s? It seemed to wink at him, stiff golden lashes coming down across a deep brown eye, then pulled its head back out of the window. Camwyn sat up just as he heard the
sound of ripping grass. Out the window were three horses: the cream and gold one that had wakened him, a red chestnut mare, and a foal whose spindly legs were spread wide as it sniffed at something in the grass.

Camwyn got up, not surprised to find a chest in the room that had not been there before and clothes hanging on pegs. He dressed, took the pot from beneath the bed, and took it out to the jacks, where he emptied it and filled in that section of trench.

“Well met, Camwyn.” Mathor was coming down the path, carrying a basket. “We have eggs this day. And some greens.”

After breakfast, Mathor urged Camwyn to take a short walk. “Here’s bread and cheese and a jug of sib. Go where you please for a time. Nothing here will harm you.”

That set the pattern for the first hands of days. Waking early, usually with a horse face in his window, breakfast with Mathor, then walking—slowly and in brief stretches at first, then longer ones. He ate whatever Mathor prepared with good appetite and slept without dreams he remembered. Mathor gave him the names of local plants, and his own mind restored many words for his thoughts, though try as he might, he could not remember much of his past. Was that face a brother? A father? An uncle? A friend? Was that other room—so different from this—a place he had lived or only visited?

One morning he made it back down to the main valley, where he found more of the horses grazing at the near end. They all raised heads and looked at him. Several approached, including the one with the milk-white mane. He put out his hand, and a muzzle brushed it; he could not resist stroking that golden neck, that silky white mane. The horse gave a soft sound, welcoming, and he kept stroking. His fingers caught in the mane—and the horse moved away, pulling gently. He walked with it, through the herd, out the other side.

When the horse dropped to its knees, Camwyn stared. What did that mean? Did it want to roll? He stepped back. The horse snorted. Camwyn had the impulse to climb onto that sloped back … but he had no saddle, no bridle—those names came to him, but so did the memory of riding. He had ridden. If the horse didn’t mind … the horse snorted again, expressing, he was sure, impatience.

He came forward and gingerly—feeling the stretch in his muscles—clambered onto the horse’s back, clutching a double handful of mane. A lurch that nearly cost him his seat, and another, and the horse stood. He felt dizzy for a moment, then his head cleared. He was riding—or sitting, he corrected himself—on a horse. A tall horse, for the ground seemed impossibly far away. The horse took one step. Camwyn tilted but recovered. Another step; this time Camwyn was able to stay upright. The horse walked off, and Camwyn first struggled to adjust to the back and forth, the sideways sway, and then found it no effort. The horse walked around the herd—all watching, as if to critique his riding—and then stopped again and shook its head.

Dismounting was harder than he’d thought it would be, but the horse stood patiently as he squirmed his way off, landing off balance and falling. The horse pivoted neatly and leaned down to blow gently in his hair. Camwyn sat up and put a hand behind its head. “Thank you,” he said. He took a handful of mane; the horse lifted its head, helping him up. When he let go of the mane, the horse walked off. Camwyn stood for a time watching the horses, then trudged back up the hill to his house.

Every day after that included a ride. Usually it was that horse, but sometimes one of the others. Often he had to walk half the length of the valley to find them, though they usually ended the ride closer to the house. As he grew stronger, the horses quit kneeling for him to mount, at first standing near a rock or stump on which he could climb but then on lower ones, and lower ones, until he was finally mounting from the ground. Their behavior once he mounted changed, too—from a slow walk to a faster one, to a comfortable gait for which he had no name but fast enough to put a breeze in his face, then a trot. He fell from time to time; the horse from which he’d fallen always stopped while he got up and mounted again.

One day when he returned to the house, he found two others with Mathor. The man was taller than Mathor, with long-fingered, ink-stained hands, and the other was a woman, yellow-haired and gray-eyed, with a merry grin. She had a ring of silver on her brow.

“Dragon says you’re well enough to start learning wisdom,” Mathor
said. “And you won’t learn that from me.” He laughed. “Master Kielson is a scholar and judicar; he’ll help you with this—” Mathor gestured to the pile of papers and books on the table. “And this paladin will help you regain your fighting skills.”

Camwyn’s memory nudged him. At one time—he thought—he had been able to read and fight. The scars on his legs and what Dragon had told him proved the latter. He nodded to them; Mathor had a meal ready, and they all sat down to eat.

Reading came back to him quickly—the papers and books taught him about something called “House of the Dragon”—a bard’s tale, he would have thought, tracing the story of that house from “Camwyn Dragonfriend” to a time when the king and his sons all died and left the Dragon Throne empty, in the care of a man who proved a fool.

“Dragon does not like fools,” Master Kielson said.

“Some of the others were fools, too,” Camwyn said. They had discussed the actions of a line of kings over the long years—some wiser and some more foolish.

“The question is, Camwyn, are you wise or a fool? You yourself?”

He glanced aside. The paladin sat at the end of the table, rubbing wool fat into a strip of leather. She looked up with a smile but said nothing. “I think … I think it is being a fool to claim wisdom, like claiming a sword or a boot as one’s own. For no one is perfectly wise but the gods—or maybe Dragon, if Dragon is not a god. But I know some things accounted wise, and I try to see ahead to the flowers of a seed, and the fruit of that flower, and the seeds it leaves. I could not do that when I woke, but I am learning.”

Master Kielson nodded. “And what must a man do to remain as wise as he is?”

“Learn more,” Camwyn said. “Become wiser. But learning means mistakes, and mistakes are not wise.” He paused, scratched his nose, and went on. “I think … if I could see more ahead … I would make fewer mistakes. But sometimes you can’t wait to think to the end of time.”

“True, and well said. We have discussed all the past kings in the House of the Dragon: Which do you think was wisest?”

“Camwyn III,” Camwyn said. He listed his reasons.

“And which the most foolish?”

“Pelyan. He was not only lazy, mean, and a drunk, he drove out that other one, the bastard.”

“Do you know what became of the bastard?”

“No—do you?”

“Indeed yes. In another land he became a peer of the realm; he is a notable military commander and has met Dragon, who considers him somewhat wise.”

“As wise as Camwyn III?”

“No … but wiser than Pelyan or the one who became Chancellor.” Master Kielson stood up and stretched. “Well, Camwyn, my work here is done, I believe. You are competent in reading; you have learned the language of the house, and from here, I believe you can educate yourself.”

“Alone?” Camwyn stared. “Sir—what I learned is that I need help.”

“And you will find the help you need, I’m certain, but for now, it is time for me to go to another student who needs me more now than you do.” He nodded toward Paks. “And you still have work to do with this lady before Dragon returns.”