The Dragon of Despair (2 page)

Night after night, she found herself drawn to some dark, quiet place where she could watch the comet, as if by watching it she could keep the heavens from doing something else unpredictable. Although the spring nights were yet chilly and damp here in the Norwood Grant at the northwestern edge of the Kingdom of Hawk Haven, Firekeeper didn’t find them uncomfortable. She’d lived unprotected through much harsher weather.

Blind Seer, her closest friend, often sat with Firekeeper on these vigils, though the wolf didn’t really understand the woman’s fascination.

“
A light in the sky
,” Blind Seer grumbled on this night as on so many others.
“That’s all it is. Come and run with me. We could terrify the deer.”

Firekeeper uncoiled herself sufficiently to swat the wolf lightly across the bridge of his long nose.

“
Let them raise their fawns in peace,
” she said,
“so there will be food for the year to come. Surely you haven’t fallen so low that you must hunt sucklings and their mothers.”

“I was more thinking of the young bucks, spring mad in the pride of their new antlers. They need humbling.”

Her eyes never leaving the fat white comet with its glowing tail, Firekeeper answered,
“And you a Royal Wolf, greatest of the great, are setting yourself the task of improving Cousin-kind? Our parents would be ashamed.”

Their argument was interrupted by the sound of feet steadily advancing along the forest trail. Neither wolf nor woman moved, for the tread was as familiar to them as the tall red-haired youth who appeared around a bend in the trail a moment later.

“I thought I’d find you out here,” Derian Carter said, greeting them with a casual wave of the hand that was not occupied balancing a tin-screened candle lantern. “Watching the comet again? I promise you, it won’t go anywhere.”

“Elation tell you where I am,” Firekeeper replied, knowing this must be so. She had many places from which she watched the comet. Animal wariness kept her from frequenting any one place too often. Elation, however, could have easily found her.

The peregrine falcon had taken a liking to Derian. Although Elation could not talk to Derian as she could to Firekeeper, she had found ways of making him understand simple things. Derian, in turn, simplified matters greatly by accepting, as most of Firekeeper’s human acquaintances still did not, that the bird was as intelligent as most humans.

“Elation might have,” Derian admitted before changing the subject. “There’s news from across the White Water River. A single courier made the crossing late this afternoon. He came to Duchess Kestrel, figuring she’d pay well to know the last several months’ gossip from New Kelvin.”

Firekeeper was interested in spite of her initial pique at having her vigil interrupted.

“From New Kelvin?”

The neighboring country was separated from Hawk Haven by a river broad and rocky enough to be difficult to cross even in the best weather. Once snowmelt had swelled the river, the two nations had been effectively cut off for better than a moonspan. Only lately had the river begun to ebb, though many days would pass before normal commerce resumed.

Derian nodded.

“And from how both the duchess and the earl remained closeted with the courier through dinner, the courier had news worth the tokens the duchess has ordered drawn from the Norwood Grant treasury.”

“And what did the courier say?” Firekeeper prompted, almost, but not quite, forgetting the comet.

“I don’t know,” Derian replied, “but we have been requested to meet with Duchess Kestrel and her son as soon as possible. Can you leave your comet unwatched?”

Firekeeper gave him a slight smile, though she knew Derian could not see it in the darkness.

“I can.”

A GROUP OF SEVEN
was to meet in Duchess Kestrel’s study—eight, if you counted Blind Seer, which Firekeeper most certainly did. As she waited for the rest to assemble and stop their idle chatter, the wolf-woman studied her surroundings, automatically noting exits and defensible corners.

This was a room Firekeeper had visited only once before. Unlike the nearby chamber claimed by her son for a similar purpose, the duchess’s study was light and uncluttered, its furniture crafted from pale woods rubbed to a high polish and scented with beeswax. The stone-flagged floors were covered in jewel-toned New Kelvinese carpets that seemed to glow in the lamplight. The broad, south-facing windows were curtained in heavy brocade woven in shades of soft golden brown and beige.

In her younger days, Saedee Norwood, Duchess Kestrel, had been a warrior who had won her spurs in a particularly nasty border skirmish with Bright Bay. There was a statue in the garden commemorating those deeds. It depicted a slim-hipped young woman brandishing a sword, an arrogant tilt to her proud head.

But those battles had been long ago. The only trace remaining of that woman was the selfsame sword hanging on the wall behind the desk where the duchess daily dealt with the business of running the large land grant that she had inherited from her father. Bearing children—two of whom had survived to adulthood—had spread Saedee Norwood’s once slim form. Bearing the responsibilities of her position had graven lines in her face.

Yet, Firekeeper thought as she watched the duchess greet those she had summoned, perhaps not all traces of that young warrior had vanished. The arrogant lift of the duchess’s head was much the same, though tempered with a restraint that might have been alien to her younger self.

There was a similar arrogance in the bearing of the duchess’s son and heir, Norvin. Earl Kestrel was a small man—indeed, his mother was taller—and maybe some of his apparent arrogance came from refusing to be seen as weak in a world where strength and size were usually equated.

Firekeeper knew the earl fairly well. It had been he who had led the expedition she had accompanied out of the western wilderness. Initially, she had thought Norvin Norwood taken up with nothing but his own advancement. Later, she had come to realize that—interested as Norvin was in promoting his own good and that of his family—he was also a commander whose troops respected him, a master whose vassals found him fair, and a parent who, though dictatorial at times, strove not to smother his children.

In the eyes of the human world, Firekeeper was one of those children—adopted by the earl soon after his return from the west. Firekeeper did not think of the earl as her father—that place in her heart belonged to the wolves who had raised her—nor did she particularly think of the earl’s four children as her siblings. One of these, however, Norvin Norwood’s eldest son and heir, had earned the wolf-woman’s mingled affection and exasperation.

Edlin Norwood entered the room even as Firekeeper thought of him, his breezy friendliness a decided contrast to his father’s and grandmother’s studied restraint. Nor did he particularly resemble them, lacking their prominent hawk-like nose. Edlin did share his father’s dark hair—though the earl’s mixed silver with the jetty black—and the earl’s pale grey eyes. Still, no one watching Edlin as he bobbed a quick bow to his grandmother and then collapsed bonelessly into a comfortable chair would have taken him for his father’s son.

But Firekeeper respected Edlin. He had been with her and Derian in New Kelvin early in the winter just past and had proven that there was more to him than met casual inspection. However, if Edlin’s deeds in New Kelvin had earned Firekeeper’s respect, they did nothing to reduce her frustration with him. Soon after Firekeeper had arrived at the Norwood Grant the previous autumn, Edlin had taken a very unbrotherly fancy to her. He’d even—so Firekeeper had heard rumored—told his father he wished to marry her.

The earl had refused without even consulting Firekeeper—though his decision proved much to Firekeeper’s relief—but his father’s refusal hadn’t ended the matter for Edlin. Often he would watch Firekeeper, sometimes covertly, more often forgetting himself and gaping with slightly openmouthed admiration.

Why Edlin fancied her Firekeeper hadn’t the least idea. In a society where women were admired for social grace and elegance—even those who, like Saedee Norwood or Crown Princess Sapphire, had won honor on the battlefield—Firekeeper possessed neither. She donned long gowns, jewels, and other such finery only under duress. Rather than displaying herself to her best advantage on some couch or embroidered chair, she preferred sitting as she was now, on the floor, her arm flung around Blind Seer, her short hair tousled from wind and weather.

Fortunately for Firekeeper, Saedee Norwood had forbidden anyone—even her son—to force Firekeeper to change her ways too drastically. As long as Firekeeper would gown when necessary, used proper utensils when dining at table, and remembered not to bolt her food, the duchess claimed herself content. Firekeeper, in turn, sought to please the duchess, preferring to offer evidence of her willingness to learn human ways on her own, rather than having those ways forced upon her.

Such attempts to please were not alien to Firekeeper’s nature. Wolves always submit before those who have power over them. To them this is an expression of respect, not a humiliation. Saedee Norwood did not ask for belly-pissing cringing, only the human equivalent of a jaw-licking tail wag.

Moreover, like her son, Saedee Norwood had proven herself worthy of Firekeeper’s respect. The wolf-woman had observed how the duchess enforced the right of individual decision not only for Firekeeper, but for other members of her household as well. At a time when a hundred years of fairly stable government was bequeathing social ritual and restraint as its gift to the younger generation, Saedee was old enough to remember when this had not been so—and wise enough to sacrifice the benefits she could have garnered from a calcifying social order for the greater benefits gained from a vital and active family.

Thus Saedee had made her son, Norvin, her partner in running the Norwood Grant at a time when several of her contemporaries were struggling to maintain a firm hold over their growing households. Equally, she used her authority over her son to keep him from rebuking Edlin too severely for the young man’s own idiosyncratic style.

But then, as Firekeeper had learned from Wendee Jay, the Kestrel retainer who served as the wolf-woman’s personal attendant, Saedee Norwood herself was an unconventional woman. No one knew who had been the father of her children—Norvin, Eirene, and several others who had not survived beyond infancy. Saedee had not only kept this information to herself—she had also refused to marry, even when offered advantageous alliances for her house.

Firekeeper stretched, wondering just a little about the pedigree of this human family with whom she found herself allied.

Edlin’s arrival brought the gathering’s number to six. Derian had arrived with Firekeeper and Blind Seer, and both duchess and earl had already been present. Now a slight rap on the door announced the last arrival.

Grateful Peace was a slender and elegant man, almost effete to Firekeeper’s way of seeing things. His hairline had receded so far back that he was nearly bald. What hair he retained was bone white. His facial features were startling—adorned as they were with the bluish green lines of several tattoos. Spectacles perched on the bridge of his thin nose and gave him a round-eyed appearance at odds with his air of quiet watchfulness.

He had come from New Kelvin the previous year, self-exiled for choosing to act against the policies of the government he had served for the previous decade and a half.

A solid hit from a crossbow bolt had forced the amputation of Grateful Peace’s right arm. While he recuperated, he had wintered at the Surcliffe family vineyards east of Duchess Kestrel’s holding. However, when the snowmelt had begun, Duchess Kestrel had invited Peace to join herself and her family at their residence—deliberately waiting to offer her invitation until the White Water River was so swollen that there would be no easy commerce between the Norwood Grant and New Kelvin for at least a moonspan. Grateful Peace was an outcast from his homeland, and no one doubted that there was a price on his life.

Nor,
Firekeeper thought,
would Peace be easy to hide. Even though he has stopped painting his face, nothing can hide the tattoos. Though he styles his hair more as men wear it here, still his very bearing and manner of standing is different. He walks awkwardly in trousers, as if his legs still need to feel the touch of robes to know when to break his stride.

Duchess Kestrel did not keep them waiting long after Grateful Peace had taken his seat.

“I assume that all of you have already heard about the courier who arrived today. ‘Courier’ may be too polite a term,” she added with wry smile. “However, it will do.

“One item of his news was rather shocking,” the duchess continued. “Before I reveal it, I must ask that you not speak of it to anyone other than those gathered here. I have chosen to reveal it to you because I would like your advice regarding what course of action I should take.”

Nods around the semicircle facing the duchess’s desk confirmed the willingness of the gathered to keep her confidence. When Firekeeper realized that this was no general gossip session—as she had first imagined when Derian had spoken to her out on the grounds—she wondered why Duchess Kestrel had wanted her here.

Duchess Kestrel did not offer to answer this unspoken question, only accepted their unspoken promises of silence with a nod of her own.

“Very well,” she said with a slight, involuntary sigh. “Melina, once of House Gyrfalcon, has married. Her new spouse is the Healed One, the hereditary monarch of New Kelvin.”

Saedee Norwood declaimed these words as if she expected them to cause a sensation, nor was she disappointed. After a moment of shocked silence, there was a tumult of questions and expressions of dismay. Firekeeper believed that she herself had kept silent, but after a moment she realized that the rumbling growl she heard was coming from her own throat.

No wonder. If there was a human Firekeeper hated and despised, it was Lady Melina Shield. She had trouble thinking of the woman by another name, although Lady Melina had been disowned and exiled and so lost both title and right to her House name. Melina had tricked and used Firekeeper—a thing for which the wolf-woman blamed herself as much as she blamed Melina, though this realization made her feel no less bitter.