King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

He woke suddenly. Sat up in fear. It was morning, St. Euseb?’s Day, a bright, fine, clear spring dawning without a trace of cloud. A day of good omens. The bay ran in smooth ripples below. The rich old green of trees rimmed the blue bowl of the sky. He swore, shaking off his stupor, and stood up.

And saw, on the path, a tiny blood-red rose. It glittered like a jewel, but when he reached to pick it up, its petals were as soft as the first flower of spring. He shifted his grip, and a thorn pricked his skin, drawing a welling bulb of blood.

“Aunt Bel,” he murmured. “Stancy.” The baby. He thrust the rose stem under his belt and ran all the way back to Osna.

A few people stared when he halted, gasping for breath, at the edge of the village common. Aunt Bel saw him, and her face went from white to red in one instant. She rushed across to him and pinned him in her arms.

“Alain! Oh, my child, I thought you were lost to us.”

“You’re all here? All well? Where is Stancy—?”

“In the workshop. My poor lad, come in, come in.” She led him unprotesting into the longhouse and sat him at the table, setting a mug of warm goat’s milk in front of him. “Lord and Lady.” She wiped a tear from her weathered face. “I was sure you must have been there. Lord and Lady, thank Them, thank Them.” She drew the Circle of Unity, throat to heart and back again. “How did you escape? When old Gilles brought the news—”

He felt a surge of hope and relief. “Brother Gilles?”

“No, lad. Gilles Fisher. He never saw the ships, they came so fast, in with that cursed storm and gone again as quickly. The whole monastery they burned, and every monk they slaughtered where he stood. All dead. But somehow, Their blessings on us, we were spared. Never a sound or a sight of them here. We’re all safe. I’m sure Henri is well south by now. They came from out of the north.”

“I never got as far as the monastery,” he whispered, but all he could see was that distant, unnatural sight of the painted men, burning, killing … beaching their ship on the strand below the village. He could not bring himself to speak of his vision, if vision it was.

“But I’m fair willing to believe,” continued Aunt Bel in a low voice, “that it was the Lord and Lady’s judgment on them in the monastery, for turning against her as ought to be Queen Regnant. Still, no use speaking ill of the dead. Some of the village men have gone over to give them a decent burial.”

“There’s something I must see.” Alain rose. Aunt Bel looked at him questioningly but he did not stay for questions, he was out the door so fast. He ran down to the strand where the fishers and merchants pulled up their boats, coming in to trade or shelter at Osna.

It took him a bit of a walk, down along the foot of the ridge, to find the long deep scar where the low-bellied ship had beached and been dragged up onto the sand. Where the tide had not obliterated them, some of the footsteps were still left, racing upward, and then stopping, milling about. There was even one thin stain of blood, coloring the dun sand, and a single shod hoofprint.

The morning stayed clear and fine as he climbed the ridge. From the dragon’s back he could see no sign of ships at all on the flat opacity of the bay or on the farther blue-gray horizon of the sea. He walked farther yet and came to an overlook where he could stand off from the path, which now wound down away from the ridge into the forest, and see down from the height to the monastery far below. It lay in smoking ruins. A few vultures circled. To the north of the church tower a pit had been dug; he saw it from here as a dark mouth. Men moved, dragging bodies into the grave. He ran, now, but by the time he reached the remains of the monastery, Chatelaine Dhuoda’s deacon was reading the mass for the dead over the grave as men from the village pitched dirt in to cover the bodies of the slain monks.

“You, boy,” said Chatelaine Dhuoda, startling him. He had not seen her. “You are the boy who was to be sworn into the novitiate today, are you not? You’re of good age? Sixteen? Yes, and you’re a fit, tall lad, I see.”

The way she looked him over made him feel like a horse or a slave from beyond the northern sea brought to the auction block.

“There’s nothing for you here now, and Count Lavastine has need of many more strong arms, as you can see yourself. These are bad times. I’ll speak with your aunt, but in any case, it is my right to mark you out for service to the count. You will come with us when we leave tomorrow.”

He did not know what to say. Overjoyed for the chance to go, he feared that it was his own desire to be free of his duty to the monks that had brought death on them. But that, as his father would say, was pride of self, to think his selfish, trivial wishes could affect the world as God’s will does. It was the godless barbarians who had brought death so cruelly; it was nothing to do with him.