What had passed next was a nightmare of embarrassment. Melyn had taken control of him as if he were no more than a puppet at the Lammas Fair. He had staggered back into the hall, reeking drunk and with wine and vomit staining his wedding shirt, and announced to all who were still awake to hear it that he was going to join the Order of the High Ffrydd. His mother had been proud, crying a lot but saying that she knew it was the best thing for him. The Inquisitor must have cast his magic on her as well, for Errol knew that Hennas hated everything to do with the warrior priests who had hounded her around the Twin Kingdoms.
Sometime after pledging to serve his princess as her personal protector, Errol had finally succumbed to the wine and passed out. Even so, he saw the proceedings continue as if he had witnessed it all. He had been carried to the cart and thrown onto the bed of hay in the back. Clun had clung to his father for long moments before finally climbing in too. And then the whole troop had ridden out of Pwllpeiran leaving the happy couple dazed, confused and childless. Errol could only assume that the Inquisitor’s glamour had been powerful enough to cloud the judgement of both bride and groom, for it was a most unusual wedding gift.
Outside the village, the troop had moved at a slow pace along the track towards the old ruined palace at Ystumtuen, at least two days ride away. Errol watched their progress in his mind, wondering how it was that he could see things he had not witnessed before. And then he saw her.
The girl in green.
She was wrapped in a long, dark cloak that camouflaged her well. She hid in the trees to the side of the track, watching the caravan pass with a look of sadness and horror on her face. As he saw her, his heart was filled with such sorrow and yearning that he feared it might stop beating. She was his greatest love, the only thing in the whole of Gwlad that he cared for. They had planned to escape, to run away from the persecution of the religious orders. But he had been captured. He wondered where she had gone, what she had done, even as he struggled to remember her name.
‘I said wake up boy. Can’t you even stay awake for ten minutes?’
Errol felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him hard. He was standing once more in the clearing watching the dragon mouth silent words in an alien tongue. He was standing in the Inquisitor’s study, watching his most hated enemy set a trap that would exterminate an entire race of noble creatures for no better reason than spite. He was standing in the shadows in the corridor and Captain Osgal was beside him.
‘I… I wasn’t asleep,’ Errol said, shaking his head to try and bring some order to his maelstrom of thoughts as the three images faded back into just one.
‘A likely story,’ Osgal said, then shoved Errol away towards the end of the corridor and the stairs. ‘Go on, get out of here you useless little shit,’ he said.
Errol bolted like a rabbit from a ferreted hole. He took the stairs two at a time and caused untold mirth amongst the gathered warriors on the ground floor as he burst through their guardroom and out into the courtyard. He sprinted across to the library building and only once he was surrounded by its massive old stone blocks and unreasonably high ceilings did he slow down. There was so much to think about, so much to try and piece together. He had to find Clun and warn him. They had to try and escape. The whole of the Order of the High Ffrydd was founded on a lie, he knew now. He wanted no part of it.
And there was the small matter of the girl in green. He had promised to be with her forever. He longed to see her again, to be with her. There was so much they had to do together, a whole world to explore and understand. He knew her name now. It had come back to him with Osgal’s harsh touch.
Martha.
~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sir Teifi teul Albarn, claimed age 1035 – killed by rioting mob, fourteenth day of Ragger-month in the sixtieth year of King Divitie XXIII – 7 large jewels, 1 small
Morwenna the Wise, claimed age 895 – killed by rioting mob, fourteenth day of Ragger-month in the sixtieth year of King Divitie XXIII – 4 large jewels, 3 small
Unnamed female kitling, age 4 years – missing, assumed killed by rioting mob, fourteenth day of Ragger-month in the sixtieth year of King Divitie XXIII – no jewels
From the Dragon Register of the Order of the Candle
‘Where’re you going squirt?’
Benfro froze in his tracks, feeling the warmth of spring leach out of the day as if a cloud had passed over the sun. The birds were trilling in the trees, new flowers had blossomed in the grass around the gnarled old trunks and the forest sang with life. He had spent the morning cooped up in Sir Frynwy’s study with Meirionydd, still with no success in his quest to see the elusive llinellau, and he had been looking forward to an afternoon’s fishing with Ynys Môn as a precursor to a planned week long hunting trip into the deep forest. Despite his lack of magical success, Benfro felt upbeat and confident that in time he would crack the problem. The winter was over and he had been filled with a delicious optimism. Until now.
Turning in the road that ran up through the village towards the green and the great hall, Benfro saw his nemesis standing in the unkempt garden of one of the cottages. With a start he realised that it was Ystrad Fflur’s house and that someone had thrown open the shutters, letting air into the empty rooms.
‘What are you doing?’ Benfro asked as Frecknock stared at him, an unusually indulgent look on her face.
‘Oh, I just thought this old place could do with some attention,’ she said. ‘It’s been well over a year since the old boy died and no-one’s been in here except the spiders.’
‘Why should you care?’ Benfro asked. ‘You’ve got a perfectly good house. You weren’t thinking of moving were you?’ He added, appalled at the thought of Frecknock taking over the cottage where he had spent so many happy hours. Better for it to sink into decay or even burn to the ground than to have that happen to it.
‘Of course not squirt,’ Frecknock said. ‘But you never know, someone might. So, what are you doing this afternoon?’
Benfro did a double take. He could see no malice in the question, no sneering condescension. Frecknock’s tone was almost jovial, as if she were simply making polite conversation. He had seen her out and about a couple of times since the night of his hatchday party, but she had not uttered a single word to him. Until now.
‘I’m going to find Ynys Môn,’ he said. ‘We thought we might see if the spring trout have started running.’
‘Ah yes, fishing,’ Frecknock said. ‘Ynys Môn’s very proud of his skills as a hunter. Personally I can’t see the point when you can just reach out and help yourself.’ As she spoke, she stretched out her hand and plucked something out of the air. Benfro couldn’t help but stare. It was one thing to know how the villagers kept themselves fed, another to watch it in action. Frecknock’s brazen display fascinated him, but it also appalled him in its lack of decorum.
‘Here, squirt,’ she said and threw the object at him. She wasn’t very good at throwing, but Benfro was a good catch. He caught the object and stared down at a shiny red apple just beginning to show the wrinkling signs of long storage.
‘It’s all right, I haven’t poisoned it,’ Frecknock added. ‘Can’t promise whoever grew it in the first place hasn’t though.’
‘Why are you giving me this?’ Benfro asked, eyeing both the apple and the dragon suspiciously.
‘Because I can,’ Frecknock said. The implication was obvious. And you can’t. Benfro knew that there had to be something to her good humour. So that was it, someone had let her know that he was struggling with his studies. Well, he could cope with her crowing. She had been learning for almost a hundred years after all. If it meant that she wouldn’t be as spiteful as he had become used to then he could put up with her taunts.
‘Thankyou,’ he said, holding up the apple and then taking a bite. It was sweet and juicy, though the skin was a bit thick and tough with storage.
‘Any time,’ Frecknock said, smiling. Benfro shuddered at the unnaturalness of it all, then turned to resume his journey, glad that he had come off unexpectedly well in this encounter.
‘Hey, squirt,’ Frecknock said. Benfro hesitated, then looked back.
‘Yes?’ He asked
‘Your mother. She had any visitors recently?’
‘No,’ Benfro said. ‘At least not whilst I’ve been there. You know she’s quite good at making sure I’m somewhere else when men are coming. Why?’
‘None of your… Never mind,’ Frecknock said and for a minute Benfro saw the old foe behind this confusing new façade.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ Benfro asked and the seed of a nasty feeling began to form at the back of his mind.
‘No,’ Frecknock said, too quickly to be entirely convincing. The tip of her tail gave an involuntary twitch. ‘Just curious. It can’t be easy, having to deal with men. They can be so vicious and brutal. I was more wondering if any dragons might have dropped by.’
‘Dragons?’ Benfro asked. ‘Are there really any others out there? I mean, I’ve never seen one.’
‘There’s hundreds of dragons in the whole of Gwlad,’ Frecknock said, her tone at once annoyed at his obvious stupidity and pleased that she knew something he didn’t. ‘Some live all alone deep in the forest, there’s dragons in the Hendry boglands and up in Llanwennog. Others travel the long road, never staying anywhere for more than a day or two. That’s your father to a tee, by the way. He never could stand to be cooped up for more than a week.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Benfro said. He was used to Frecknock’s taunting and knew better than to rise to it even if the barb hurt. ‘I’ve never met him. But you must have. Maybe you could tell me something about him.’
‘I never much cared for Sir Trefaldwyn,’ Frecknock said. ‘He was always too full of himself, preening around with his great leathery wings like some strutting cockerel; flirting with all the female dragons, even though he would no more leave your mother than he would cut off his own nose. He wasn’t as good a bard as Sir Frynwy, nor as good a mage as Meirionydd. He couldn’t heal like your mother can and he was too impatient to hunt. Quite honestly I don’t know what he was good for. Siring you, I suppose, and look what a wonderful thing that turned out to be.’
Benfro could feel his blood warming at the string of taunts. But he knew that they were meaningless even if they annoyed him. So his father was not perfect. He knew that all too well. If it weren’t so, then he would have been around for the last fourteen years. Yet never in that time had he heard his mother say a bad word about him. She had been sad, at times desperately so. Benfro knew the anniversary of the day Sir Trefaldwyn had left the village only too well. A week either side of it, Morgwm would be taciturn and short, but on the actual day she would take herself off into the forest, not returning until the sun began to rise on the next morning.
‘Why did he leave?’ Benfro asked. He didn’t expect Frecknock to give him a true answer, but then no one else in the village had ever really spoken about his father, except to say that it was a subject only his mother could possibly talk about.
‘Who knows? Cold feet at becoming a father?’ Frecknock said. ‘Maybe he wandered too far and got killed by some men.’
‘Would they do that?’ Benfro asked. ‘I thought dragons were protected by the king.’
‘You really are quite stupid, you know that, squirt,’ Frecknock said. ‘Firstly King Divitie, whom Ynys Môn so nobly saved from his well-deserved death, spent most of his youth persecuting and killing us. Even after he graciously agreed to stop it, we were still hunted. And mostly the king didn’t really care. He still got our jewels and he didn’t have to pay out gold for them. Oh yes, occasionally if someone was a bit too blatant about it he’d string them up by their neck in the courtyard of the Neuadd, but we didn’t stop dying just because he stopped killing us. And in order to maintain this pretence of protection we had to pay tributes to the crown. I was presented to him as a kitling, can you imagine anything more terrifying?’
‘You?’ Benfro asked, genuinely surprised. In truth he had never imagined Frecknock as anything other than as she was, but she must have been a kitling once and she was young enough to have been hatched in Divitie’s reign, if he remembered the history right.
‘You’ve met, what, one man?’ Frecknock asked. ‘Well imagine what it feels like to be surrounded by hundreds of them, to be poked at and prodded by their clammy, warm hands; to hear only their jabbering tongue and know that they’re laughing at you, that you’re completely at their mercy.’
For the first time in his life, Benfro felt sorry for Frecknock. Not enough sympathy to forgive her for the lifetime of torment she had visited upon him, but knowing she too had suffered at the hands of others went some small way towards explaining why she did to him what she did. He had not been presented to the royal court. His mother had flouted the laws of the king. No wonder Frecknock was jealous of him.
‘What changed, then?’ Benfro asked. ‘Why’d we hide ourselves away from men?’
‘Because they can’t be trusted to keep their word,’ Frecknock said. ‘Hasn’t your mother taught you anything about them? They killed my parents for nothing. We weren’t doing anything to harm them, we weren’t even living close to any of their settlements, but still they came, in the night. My parents died so that I could escape. I wandered through the forest for months before Meirionydd found me. She brought me here and I’ve stayed here ever since.’