to a Welshman, and would not think kindly of a village whelp who would try to intervene.” Even as she said this, she knew that the marriage would not take place. It was an imposition, something she would prevent, but Jason did not know that, and she sometimes used the betrothal to her own advantage in conversations like this one.
“I’m seventeen,” said Jason defensively. “I’ve got my own flock already. I’m full-grown by any standard.”
Elspeth was unimpressed by this claim. “Are you man enough to deal with Meurig ap Gwynedd?” she asked.
“Bring him on,” Jason replied, but just then they came in sight of Elspeth’s hut, and he stopped before he could be seen by her father. Just before he left, he reached out and grabbed Elspeth by her braided hair, forcing a kiss. “You’re mine,” he said. Then he turned with the other boys and ran for the village.
Elspeth aimed an imaginary crossbow of her own and pulled an imaginary trigger. “So much for manhood,” she muttered as she continued along the path.
❧
As he thought about it, Fletcher realized he didn’t have it in him to confront the girl about the pups. At least not directly. He had had his say last night at supper. Today he was too tired from the hunt to bring it up again. It was none of her affair. A man’s work, that’s all. He skinned the wolf, gave the meat to Aelric for the dog, set the pelt aside for the sheriff, and made his way back up the path to Willem’s pub for ale. One flagon. Two. Maybe more. He couldn’t remember and he didn’t care. He hardly saw the flagons, said hardly a word to Sarabeth, but he was in a bad way as he stumbled back to his hut in the dark.
Elspeth had a small fire going, and a stew. “I was worried about you,” she said.
He pulled out a chair and dropped heavily into the seat, spreading his legs to steady himself.
“Eat some stew,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”
Fletcher said nothing. Who was she to tell him what to do, or how to feel better? “Don’t want stew,” he said heavily. He was having trouble forming up the words. “Bring some of that beer. We’ve got beer, don’t we?” His speech was slow and slurred like the mud in the river after a storm.
“You’ve had enough,” she said quietly.
“Who are you to tell me anything?” he demanded. “What do you know? About life? About anything? You think you’re so smart. What? Because of that bookbinder and his wife? You’re a girl, not even a woman. You’re like your mother.”
“Father, don’t . . .” she said.
“I thought you wanted to know about your mother.”
“I thought you loved her.”
“She was too good for us little people. Sat around reading while the other women worked. Puts ideas into her head. She starts imagining things, having dreams, thinks they’re real, that’s what she does.”
This tirade lasted until the light in the hut had faded so badly he had to grope to find his bed, stumbling in fully dressed.
Elspeth removed her father’s shoes and set them by the door, then went to her own bed. Before he had finished, her father said something that troubled her even more deeply than his drinking or his going on and on about her mother: The creature in the dream had been a dragon. And then her father had added angrily that she could not—must not—tell anybody about the dragon in the dream. The sheriff would catch wind of it and think she had gone mad. “Not a word,” he had said. “Not to Alcera, not to Levente, not to anybody.” She would be taken away from her father. Does having dreams about a dragon make one crazy? Had she gone mad? Would they take her away?
She sat up in bed and leaned her back against the bedstead of her small cot, arms wrapped around her knees, trying to tease out memories of what had happened in the dream about the dragon, but the dream was too far gone and she could not recall the details. Even so, thinking about it she had trouble going to sleep. What if the dream returned? She threw back the covers to cool her sweating ankles. She rose and went to the window to open the shutters and draw some air into the room. It wasn’t far—three or four steps—though it seemed to take forever. She felt as though she was walking in slow motion, the way a jester might walk in one of the festivals at the castle. It was a struggle to get to the window.
Even so, she was careful not to wake her father. She remembered pausing to catch her breath, then opening the shutters slowly, stopping just short of the spot where she knew they would creak.
Through the open window, moon-beams had cast a soft glow around the hut. She paused a moment to breathe in the air and let her heart stop pounding. In the distance, outlined against the sky above her she could see the towers of the Monastery of St Cuthbert and St Chad, the high belfry a finger pointing toward the heavens, and beside the monastery the lower walls of the Convent of St Elizabeth, then the town, and nearer, to the left, the foregate where the sheriff’s armory was kept. Beyond the wall of the convent, the river made a ribbon in the moonlight, a silvery snake that bellied up to the bluff on one side, then stretched lazily across a woven tapestry of fields and farm houses, curled down beside another sleepy village, dropped rapidly into a steep ravine and finally in the far distance laid the tip of its tail in a lake that glistened silver in the bright moonlight.
Elspeth turned to go back to bed. The hut was still lighted by the dying embers of the fire in the fireplace where she had cooked the evening meal for herself and her father. On the table was the long-bread she had set out for their breakfast. She could hear her father’s breathing behind the curtain of the canopy bed, heavier than usual, but regular and deep. Elspeth had always taken comfort in her father’s night breathing. Its regularity had the effect of a clock—like the tower clock at the church. Her father’s night breathing measured off the night almost without variation. Everything was as it should be. She thought about the creature, the dragon. Would it come back?
A breeze came in through the window, ruffling her hair, then her bedclothes, then the curtain on her father’s canopy bed. Within the bed behind the canopy there was a soft glow, like the embers of the dying fire in the fireplace, but it ebbed and flowed in a rhythmic pattern, regular and deep like her father’s breathing. The only thing like it she had ever seen was the pile of coals in the forge at the blacksmith shop, flowing and ebbing with the movement of the bellows. She held her breath and slipped quietly in for a closer look. With one hand she steadied herself against the bedpost, and with the other she drew back the canopy—ever so gently—to see what made the glow in her father’s bed.
What she had seen was not her father at all, but a large animal, sleeping. She had watched in silence as the animal rolled over. It looked like a huge lizard, but larger than any lizard she had ever seen. Its upper back was covered with scales, like a trout maybe, which gave way to plates beneath on the creature’s underbelly. Its back was dark green, with an iridescent shimmer of yellow, but beneath, in the underbelly, the green lightened until it was almost white. The creature had four legs, the hind legs large and strong, the forelegs very small, with claws instead of feet. Each of the claws had three large talons, each talon the size of a man’s finger.
On its back were disproportionately large wings, too large for the body. From the size of the wings, Elspeth guessed that the dragon was still young, a pup or a kit, she did not know what to call it. A creature with wings of that size would need to be much larger in the body or the wings would be unworkable. Even so, the dragon was not small. She had the impression that if it were stretched out to its full length it might be larger than she was. On its head were two pointed, scaly ears, and large bulges where its eyes protruded
