Tales of the Dragon's Bard, Volume 1: Eventide (30 page)

How could he pronounce the blessings of the gods when he knew in his private, dark moments that he was a fraud . . . that the divine voice he thought he heard was only the echoing sound of his own imaginations?

A shadow moving among the pillars caught his eye.

Someone was in the church.

Father Patrion frowned for a moment and then set down his rake. His hands were dirty from tending the grounds, so he wiped them as best he could on his already dirty apron and stepped up the wide stairs leading to the pillars.

The day was brilliant and crisp, but it was always shadowed within the church. Father Patrion had entirely forgotten the felt hat still perched atop his head as he passed between the columns and into the chill sanctuary of the church proper.

A woman stood at the altar.

Father Patrion let out a long sigh. Here was another patron come into the church that seemed to have no god in particular. He hated this part—approaching the new petitioner at the altar and not knowing which particular form of deity he would have to address or whether his first words uttered would be a complete offense to the person before him. It had become a game that he did not care to play, always starting in the most general terms and trying as quickly as possible to figure out the specifics of the person’s faith.

“May I help you?” Father Patrion offered.

The woman wore a long, hooded cape of ultramarine hue. She knelt at the altar.

Patrion cleared his throat, speaking a little louder. “May I help you?”

The woman lifted her head and turned around. Seeing the priest, she smiled and stood up. Her face was a pretty oval, framed pleasantly in the hood. Her eyes were an unusual cobalt blue. “You’re . . . Father Pantheon, aren’t you?”

Father Patrion drew in a patient breath. “Yes, my child; that is what the townsfolk call me.”

“It’s a good name,” she said, laughter wrinkling the corners of her eyes. “I like it. I think it suits you very well.”

“I’m . . . sorry,” the priest said, walking toward the woman. “Have we met before?”

“Oh, I know you well,” she said fondly. “However, our meeting is too long overdue. You’ve a beautiful church here, Father Pantheon.”

“Well, thank you,” Patrion answered. “The town built it.”

The woman cocked her head slightly as though listening, then said quietly, “Then blessed is the town of Eventide.”

“Yes,” the priest said, looking at the ground. “I pray that it is.”

The woman looked back at the priest. “I have come on a mission of forgiveness, Father Pantheon. Can you help me with that?”

“I . . . I don’t know, my child. I . . .”

“You seem troubled, Father,” the woman said, reaching out and touching his arm.

He looked into her eyes. They looked back at him with such sympathy that he could not lie to her.

“It . . . it is a foolish thing,” he said. “I shouldn’t trouble you . . .”

“Come, Father, it is just the two of us here,” the woman said with a shrug as she leaned back against the altar. “What weighs on your thoughts?”

“Well, some months ago, back when Spring Revels were being held—do you know about Spring Revels?”

“I do indeed!” the woman replied. “A great festival and a marvelous Couples’ Dance, I understand.”

The priest winced. “Yes. Well, I was supposed to arrange meetings between two young couples. I wrote down the instructions that same night—I was so careful about it. But when the day of the Revels came, I knew, I just knew I had the instructions wrong. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow mixed everything up. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I went out into the town, found the two young men involved, and switched their instructions.”

“Switched them, you say?”

“Yes!” he said angrily. “Those young men ended up with the wrong women, and nothing has been right with any of them ever since. How inspired a man can I be if I can’t even follow my own written instructions?”

The woman shook her head. “You did it perfectly, Patric.”

Father Patrion looked up. “What did you say?”

She took both his hands in hers. “I need to tell you something.”

“What?” the priest asked, his heart quickening.

She leaned forward and spoke quietly in his ear. “You wrote it down correctly . . . just not right.”

Father Patrion pulled back. “Who . . . what does that mean?”

The woman smiled quietly. “It means that I told you to mix up the instructions . . . and you heard me and did as I asked.”

“But . . . why?”

“Because a young man needed to learn what lasting love required,” the woman said, “and that it doesn’t come in a Treasure Box.”

Father Patrion stared in wonder at the woman.

“More than that,” she laughed. “So that you, my faithful friend, would learn after all that I know how well and forever remembered you are for serving this blessed town on my behalf . . . my own, dear Father Pantheon.”

She reached up and pulled back her hood, and the radiance of the sun filled the church. When it faded, the Lady of the Sky was gone.

And Father Pantheon never again wrote to the Masterpriests in Mordale—but happily served all the people of Eventide all the days of his life.

“This is the worst plan I have heard yet!” shouted Aren, his voice nearly shaking the rafters of his own home. “He’s going to bring a
dragon
. . . here to Eventide?”

Abel could only shrug.

“That’s what the note said,” Beulandreus huffed. “And the whole town knows about it.”

“You mean he told them he was bringing a dragon to the town?” Aren looked down at the dwarf in astonishment.

“No, not at all!” the blacksmith replied. “He told them that the dragon was coming to ravage the countryside and burn down the town. He suggested that the town fathers form some sort of a defense and that the only logical one to handle it was the bravest man in all Eventide . . .”

“Jarod Klum,” they both said at the same time.

“Aye, that’s what he told them,” the dwarf continued. “And pretty much what that Gossip Fairy and that whole group of hens on Cobblestone Street have been spreading about the town all day.”

The centaur folded his arms across his wide chest and shook his head. “He cannot seriously think this is going to end in anything but a disaster, can he?”

Abel tried to look anywhere but at Farmer Bennis.

“The note here says,” Beulandreus pointed at the parchment in his hand, “that he will ask the great dragon Khrag to fly over the town a time or two after Sobrina and Lucius get wedded, spout a bit of flame, and then fly off. Jarod will be the hero of the day and Caprice will be his the next day.”

“So, he’s left us with a pretty story and run off,” Aren said, seething.

“Says here,” Beulandreus continued reading the note, “that you’d say that and that he is leaving his scribe here as his assurance of his return.”

The centaur scowled at the scribe, who feebly waved his hand in reply.

“If that’s our assurance, then we’ve seen the last of the fabled Dragon’s Bard,” Aren said in a husky voice. “The only thing to do is take that note to the town fathers and let them know they’ve been tricked.”

“Unless they ain’t,” Beulandreus said, folding up the note.

“What are you talking about, blacksmith?”

“I mean, what if he
has
gone off to get a dragon?” the blacksmith replied. “We go to the town fathers with this note, they don’t do anything about defending the town, and then a dragon shows up? That don’t do anyone any good.”

“So then Jarod spends all his nights watching the skies for a dragon that is never going to show up?” Aren threw his hands up in the air. “How does that help him win the heart of his woman?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that on the road out here, you might say . . .”

“Please, I’m not sure I want to hear—”

“What we need is a contingency dragon,” the dwarf pronounced.

“A . . . what?” Aren thought perhaps the world was going mad. “Where would we get
another
dragon?”

“Well,” said the smith, “I could
build
one.”

It is a curious thing about humans that they like to scare themselves. The dire news of the approaching dragon galvanized the town and set them on a determined course to provide for their own defense. The ladies of Cobblestone Street spoke of being murdered in their beds by the dragon while Jep Walters and Squire Melthalion argued endlessly over the preparations being made for the defense of the town.

This, of course, was all being done to counter the rumored approach of a dragon that no one had ever seen. Prior to this, the fact that no one in Eventide had seen a dragon had been attributed to the Dragon’s Bard having done his job so well in collecting stories that the dragon had withheld its wrath. Now the Dragon’s Bard had disappeared, and rumors of impending doom ran rampant in the town. No effort was being spared to save Eventide from this unseen menace.

So the Dragonwatch was formed the next day. Made up of a volunteer militia, this muster of valiant, stalwart men and (thanks to Deniva Kolyan’s insistence) valiant, stalwart women as well were to defend the town against any attack by this newly perceived threat. Nearly everyone in town insisted on being listed in the ranks, except for Lord Gallivant, who said that he had seen too much of that sort of thing and would just wait in the inn until it was over. Aren Bennis, the dwarf blacksmith, and Abel were all conspicuously absent but excused as they seemed to be working on a project of their own out in the barn behind Bolly’s Mill.

Jarod the Fearless (as he had become universally known in the town) was by unanimous acclaim put in charge of the watch—his bravery after his induction into the Black Guild Brotherhood now the talk of all Eventide—and though he had never served in the King’s Army, the village put their faith in his planning for their defense.

Jarod took the news of his posting well. It came with regular pay for his services, straight from the parish council, which would slowly allow him to build up his bride price offering. Those coins he started putting in his Treasure Box, counting them each day. Yet he knew that the very survival of the town had been entrusted to him, and he took his duties most seriously.

He sat down at his desk in the countinghouse and drew out a few sheets of parchment, having decided to come up with a plan.

Jarod had heard a number of tales about dragons and used these stories as a basis for his deliberations. His father always told him to take his time and reason through things step by step in his mind before he did anything. Jarod approached the defense of the town with serious thought.

Dragons, he reasoned, flew through the air; therefore, it would be in the air that they would need to mount their defense. People, he then reasoned, do not fly, and he considered possible ways of changing that condition but could come up with no workable solution. Pixies flew, he thought, as did fairies, but he hardly thought they could do enough damage to a dragon to be of use. Then he remembered the dwarf showing him some tapestries he had made depicting some of the epic sieges of the past against castles and dragons. Those had large devices that looked like enormous crossbows hurling bolts the size of tree trunks high into the sky—ballistae, the dwarf called them.

At the time, Jarod’s mind had leaped at once to the possibilities of using these machines to launch the men and women of the Dragonwatch into the sky to fight the dragon . . . but the dwarf said the boy was missing the point. When Jarod calmed down a bit, he realized that the dwarf meant to hurl the enormous bolts into the sky to pierce the dragon, but Jarod wanted something more dramatic . . . what if the huge bolts carried
fire
with them?

Now,
that
would look wonderful in a tapestry!

At Jarod’s insistence, the town built two huge ballistae—all they could afford—and stationed one of them in Trader’s Square just in front of the Guild Hall and mill while the other was placed across the river in Charter Square next to the sundial. Each of them stood pointing skyward in anticipation, the tips of their huge bolts covered in oil-soaked peat from the southern bogs. Burning torches in braziers were placed near at hand, ready to ignite the bolts with flame in an instant. Extra bolts were laid up against the sides of the inn and the mill. Open kegs of oil were also stored in the mill, should the first bolts fail to hit their mark.

At last all was set. Jarod took the first watch. The crews for the ballistae stood at the ready.

All that night . . .

And the next . . . and the next . . .

Night after night passed, and though the skies remained as free of dragons as ever before, the tales of the dragon’s potential terror rose with each passing sunset. The latest rumor said that the dragon was magical and could actually make itself invisible so that the power of its terrible breath could rain down on the village homes before it was ever even seen. The Muster of the Dragonwatch redoubled its efforts now to see the dragon even if it was invisible.

Jarod, however, began to despair. He really did not care about killing the dragon—the prospect of killing anything frightened him—and he hoped the dragon would simply not show up. Each night on watch he sat quietly by the Charter Square ballista until the early hours of the morning before dawn, staring at the sundial, turning his wooden Treasure Box over and over in his hands. He pondered the curse that had broken the wishing well. He wondered how it could be ended by a sunset and sunrise being heralded at the same time and if there were any way to put a sunset inside his wooden box.

“Hail, my old friends! It is I, the Dragon’s . . .”

The centaur clasped his enormous hand over the mouth of Edvard and dragged him into the back of the blacksmith shop.

“What are you doing here?” Aren demanded.

“I’ve returned, as I said I would,” Edvard said. “Surely you knew that of all minstrels, a Dragon’s Bard is a man of his word!”

“I’ll let that alone,” said Beulandreus. “Did you bring that dragon after all?”

The Dragon’s Bard was suddenly crestfallen.

“Alas! Dragons are fickle and difficult things,” the Bard replied. “Though I pressed my case to him in most earnest terms, I fear he will not be able to assist us as I have hoped. He did give me every assurance that he would make an attempt, barring further conflicts and previous commitments, of course . . .”