dragon bard (beta)
Chapter eleven: freezing strange
This is a work in progress, meant for newsletter subscribers only! Please keep the link private, and excuse any typos, etc--fully edited book to come fall 2021!
The bard whistled to his dragon as he walked, harmonizing the unnamed jig to the low moan of the wind through the ice dunes. To the south the Gauntlet mountains stuck blue above the horizon, like a row of razor teeth biting sky.
His mind worked like those teeth as he walked, gnawing at the story he’d heard from the harvester at Copperslee caldera. The man had been out harvesting a hibernating mare--harvesting, never poaching: that was an imperial word—and seen an unusual flotilla of dragons in the sky.
“Biggest one a’ve seen in ages,” the man had said, furs bristling with metallic droplets of blood from his work. “That’s what made me look. This close to the Gauntlets, you see ‘em now and then. The elders.”
Alumag had just nodded, used by now to the inflated tales of men who worked the ice, and the way his presence seemed to bring them out, as it brought out the deepest gossip from the women. Both were useful, which was why he always gave his name, but finding the truth in that kind of talk was like tuning without a pitchfork: it took a careful ear.
What the man said next had rung true.
“Wasn’t what made me watch, though. That was the rest of the clutch. Freezing strange, for a wildling pack. Half of ‘em were copper scales, the rest of ‘em gray and green, like they’d come from all over the ice, and none of ‘em cobalt except the elder.” The harvester had levelled a bushy-eyebrowed gaze at him. “Another attack, unless I miss my mark.”
The strength of that suspicion had driven the Bard from Copperslee caldera, where he’d been the last four days, studying records. The blacksmith there kept track of all attacks and sightings around Copperslee dating back nearly to its settling, eighteen years before. The data was good, and some pattern in it nagged at him, but it would keep. The best place to find evidence was at an actual site, much as he hated seeing them.
The going, at least, was easy between these settlements, the paths traveled enough for lugeways to hold. Ligipag lay on her belly, her long form fit into the melted-then-refrozen groove of the road, propelling them along with her forelegs as the heat of her belly created a constant layer of water beneath, easing their passage and smoothing the luge for the next dragon to pass.
He hadn’t seen any since leaving this morning, which wasn’t necessarily a sign that Makina’s settlement had been the one attacked. With just her and the boy there, they didn’t likely leave that often. Still, the harvester’s description had pointed right to them.
The next note caught in his throat. He did not look forward to finding them dead. The boy was too bright-eyed and innocent, and Makina—the woman had a depth that spoke to more than her history as a Hand, or her hard years on the ice. He hadn’t met many that deep. Only one, maybe.
Ligipag snorted and he switched to another melody, something he’d been playing with the last few weeks. The smith’s records seemed to point toward Makina’s caldera as well, showing nearly twice as many incidents in their direction as north or east. The calderas south were too young for the smith to have much data.
The bard grimaced, adjusting his furs where the wind was pushing in icy fingers. This would make nineteen attacks this year, though he hadn’t personally checked the one reported a hundred leagues further west, near Kaelipag Bay.
Nineteen attacks and no answers. It had to be humans. There had never been a reported incident of dragons fighting, not between domesticated animals or wildlings. And the attacks always liberated domesticated dragons, which only made sense—if he were to come on a group of humans kept captive in pens by the dragons and lulled into submission somehow, he would do everything he could to free them. They wanted their own back, and free.
The question was, why now? Why Year 26 of Empress Graelia’s reign, instead of the first years they settled the ice? Or a hundred years from now, when with any luck settled calderas would spread across the continent, and actually encroach on the dragons’ land? As it was, cartographers estimated they had only covered ten to fifteen percent of the land available—it wasn’t as though they were shutting the dragons out.
Or that they posed any real threat to them, other than those raised in capitivty, and the few wildlings they harvested. One dragon could kill hundreds in a single attack, and maybe not even mean to. Harvesters struggled to kill dragons that were hibernating and so cold they literally couldn’t fight back.
So though he hated poking through frozen calderas, though he would rather be singing for his supper in a roasting warm commonhouse any day, he would track this attack down, if attack it was. See what he could learn from it. Because this was the only way he knew to find out what was going on, before it threatened the already-fragile civilization they were building here.
His civilization.
Ligipag snorted, and he realized he had changed tunes again, slowing his rhythm to the Mourn for Elieye, a song he had written decades ago. He remembered the writing of it, the endless afternoon spent in an upper room of House Chanan’s estates, watching the mountain shadow grow over Chanan City through the leaded glass windows. Taking solace in his lute, when his lover’s arms would no longer offer it, mourning the easy bard life he’d known as it vanished into growing rhythms of war.
A mound appeared in the near distance, just to the south of the luge track. Makina’s caldera, unless he missed his mark. He slapped Ligipag’s side, cueing her to slow, then stepped from the warmth of her back and took up her reins. The settlement’s windpaddle still turned, lull thumping out a steady rhythm, but there was a stillness to the place.
Alumag sighed, feeling the weight in his chest get two souls heavier. Feeling the fear that he would not understand these attacks, not find a solution to them, grow heavier still, like lead inside his bones.
“Come on, girl,” he said in time to the caldera’s lull. “Let’s go see if this was your people’s doing, or mine.”
The mare climbed with him up the steep escarpment, frost turning to steam beneath her feet. The sight that met them at the top was not at all what he was expecting: the settlement had been attacked, yes. The pens were empty and the garden was frozen solid, a deep cold to the place that spoke of a caldera frozen hundreds of feet down, as only an elder wurm could do.
But in the center of the rocky courtyard, a sea-green dragon remained, curled into a ball with wings covering each side, as if she’d chosen to hibernate then and there.
Hours after an attack. His breath caught in his throat. Dragons never stayed after an attack. Why would they? They were free.
Alumag started down, heart beating fast. Here. Here was something different. The clue he needed.
Then he slowed. Different could mean dangerous. Likely meant it, with a dragon acting abnormally. Lulls were supposed to keep dragons from hibernating, as even the relatively small domesticated wurms could freeze a settlement solid, given enough time. If this one had gone into hibernation, then perhaps it was free of the lull’s effect, somehow.
The thought was an ice wind, blowing over the fire of his curiosity. He did not fear death, but did fear dying before he had solved this problem for the ice.
So he made his way down cautiously, handheld lull in his hands ready to reinforce the windpaddle’s beat, if the dragon seemed unaffected. He searched for any other abnormalities as he descended, scanning the walls for signs of battle, or artifacts of a raider attack. There were no bodies immediately visible, but that was not uncommon—perhaps the dragon had come at night, or found them inside. He’d searched more than one empty caldera, only to find its occupants frozen around a dinner table, food halfway to mouths like some grim Cemian sculpture.
Two thirds of the way down, the dragon moved.
Not much, and not in the lightning-fast motion of an unlulled dragon, but it moved. Lifted its head from where it had tucked under one wing, scales grating as it lifted enough to gaze at him.
Alumag froze. Then cleared his throat. “Ah, no harm meant here,” he called, some disconnected part of him noting how afraid he must be to try talking to a dragon. “Just curious what happened. Did you—happen to see anything?”
The mare said nothing, just watched with molten eyes, her gaze disturbingly self-aware. Behind him, Ligipag rattled her tail along her leg scales, as she did sometimes when he tried talking to her. There were theories this was a sort of crow call between the dragons, but what it meant was as inscrutable as the language of the old world’s ravens.
“Are the people inside?” he asked, feeling a bizarre need to keep up the conversation. Like if the dragon just felt they were friends, it wouldn’t freeze him on the spot. “Did you used to live here? Decided to come back after the elder freed you?”
He took a hesitant step closer, trying to read this single dragon, like she was a Elyzan glyph-koan, meaning hidden in her twists and folds, if he could only make it out.
She moved again and he froze. Gently, she retracted her spread wing. It took him a moment to see what she held beneath her, trapped in the warm pocket between wing and belly.
The bard sucked in a breath. It Makina’s son—Kantalo, his name had been. And it looked like the boy still breathed.
His mind worked like those teeth as he walked, gnawing at the story he’d heard from the harvester at Copperslee caldera. The man had been out harvesting a hibernating mare--harvesting, never poaching: that was an imperial word—and seen an unusual flotilla of dragons in the sky.
“Biggest one a’ve seen in ages,” the man had said, furs bristling with metallic droplets of blood from his work. “That’s what made me look. This close to the Gauntlets, you see ‘em now and then. The elders.”
Alumag had just nodded, used by now to the inflated tales of men who worked the ice, and the way his presence seemed to bring them out, as it brought out the deepest gossip from the women. Both were useful, which was why he always gave his name, but finding the truth in that kind of talk was like tuning without a pitchfork: it took a careful ear.
What the man said next had rung true.
“Wasn’t what made me watch, though. That was the rest of the clutch. Freezing strange, for a wildling pack. Half of ‘em were copper scales, the rest of ‘em gray and green, like they’d come from all over the ice, and none of ‘em cobalt except the elder.” The harvester had levelled a bushy-eyebrowed gaze at him. “Another attack, unless I miss my mark.”
The strength of that suspicion had driven the Bard from Copperslee caldera, where he’d been the last four days, studying records. The blacksmith there kept track of all attacks and sightings around Copperslee dating back nearly to its settling, eighteen years before. The data was good, and some pattern in it nagged at him, but it would keep. The best place to find evidence was at an actual site, much as he hated seeing them.
The going, at least, was easy between these settlements, the paths traveled enough for lugeways to hold. Ligipag lay on her belly, her long form fit into the melted-then-refrozen groove of the road, propelling them along with her forelegs as the heat of her belly created a constant layer of water beneath, easing their passage and smoothing the luge for the next dragon to pass.
He hadn’t seen any since leaving this morning, which wasn’t necessarily a sign that Makina’s settlement had been the one attacked. With just her and the boy there, they didn’t likely leave that often. Still, the harvester’s description had pointed right to them.
The next note caught in his throat. He did not look forward to finding them dead. The boy was too bright-eyed and innocent, and Makina—the woman had a depth that spoke to more than her history as a Hand, or her hard years on the ice. He hadn’t met many that deep. Only one, maybe.
Ligipag snorted and he switched to another melody, something he’d been playing with the last few weeks. The smith’s records seemed to point toward Makina’s caldera as well, showing nearly twice as many incidents in their direction as north or east. The calderas south were too young for the smith to have much data.
The bard grimaced, adjusting his furs where the wind was pushing in icy fingers. This would make nineteen attacks this year, though he hadn’t personally checked the one reported a hundred leagues further west, near Kaelipag Bay.
Nineteen attacks and no answers. It had to be humans. There had never been a reported incident of dragons fighting, not between domesticated animals or wildlings. And the attacks always liberated domesticated dragons, which only made sense—if he were to come on a group of humans kept captive in pens by the dragons and lulled into submission somehow, he would do everything he could to free them. They wanted their own back, and free.
The question was, why now? Why Year 26 of Empress Graelia’s reign, instead of the first years they settled the ice? Or a hundred years from now, when with any luck settled calderas would spread across the continent, and actually encroach on the dragons’ land? As it was, cartographers estimated they had only covered ten to fifteen percent of the land available—it wasn’t as though they were shutting the dragons out.
Or that they posed any real threat to them, other than those raised in capitivty, and the few wildlings they harvested. One dragon could kill hundreds in a single attack, and maybe not even mean to. Harvesters struggled to kill dragons that were hibernating and so cold they literally couldn’t fight back.
So though he hated poking through frozen calderas, though he would rather be singing for his supper in a roasting warm commonhouse any day, he would track this attack down, if attack it was. See what he could learn from it. Because this was the only way he knew to find out what was going on, before it threatened the already-fragile civilization they were building here.
His civilization.
Ligipag snorted, and he realized he had changed tunes again, slowing his rhythm to the Mourn for Elieye, a song he had written decades ago. He remembered the writing of it, the endless afternoon spent in an upper room of House Chanan’s estates, watching the mountain shadow grow over Chanan City through the leaded glass windows. Taking solace in his lute, when his lover’s arms would no longer offer it, mourning the easy bard life he’d known as it vanished into growing rhythms of war.
A mound appeared in the near distance, just to the south of the luge track. Makina’s caldera, unless he missed his mark. He slapped Ligipag’s side, cueing her to slow, then stepped from the warmth of her back and took up her reins. The settlement’s windpaddle still turned, lull thumping out a steady rhythm, but there was a stillness to the place.
Alumag sighed, feeling the weight in his chest get two souls heavier. Feeling the fear that he would not understand these attacks, not find a solution to them, grow heavier still, like lead inside his bones.
“Come on, girl,” he said in time to the caldera’s lull. “Let’s go see if this was your people’s doing, or mine.”
The mare climbed with him up the steep escarpment, frost turning to steam beneath her feet. The sight that met them at the top was not at all what he was expecting: the settlement had been attacked, yes. The pens were empty and the garden was frozen solid, a deep cold to the place that spoke of a caldera frozen hundreds of feet down, as only an elder wurm could do.
But in the center of the rocky courtyard, a sea-green dragon remained, curled into a ball with wings covering each side, as if she’d chosen to hibernate then and there.
Hours after an attack. His breath caught in his throat. Dragons never stayed after an attack. Why would they? They were free.
Alumag started down, heart beating fast. Here. Here was something different. The clue he needed.
Then he slowed. Different could mean dangerous. Likely meant it, with a dragon acting abnormally. Lulls were supposed to keep dragons from hibernating, as even the relatively small domesticated wurms could freeze a settlement solid, given enough time. If this one had gone into hibernation, then perhaps it was free of the lull’s effect, somehow.
The thought was an ice wind, blowing over the fire of his curiosity. He did not fear death, but did fear dying before he had solved this problem for the ice.
So he made his way down cautiously, handheld lull in his hands ready to reinforce the windpaddle’s beat, if the dragon seemed unaffected. He searched for any other abnormalities as he descended, scanning the walls for signs of battle, or artifacts of a raider attack. There were no bodies immediately visible, but that was not uncommon—perhaps the dragon had come at night, or found them inside. He’d searched more than one empty caldera, only to find its occupants frozen around a dinner table, food halfway to mouths like some grim Cemian sculpture.
Two thirds of the way down, the dragon moved.
Not much, and not in the lightning-fast motion of an unlulled dragon, but it moved. Lifted its head from where it had tucked under one wing, scales grating as it lifted enough to gaze at him.
Alumag froze. Then cleared his throat. “Ah, no harm meant here,” he called, some disconnected part of him noting how afraid he must be to try talking to a dragon. “Just curious what happened. Did you—happen to see anything?”
The mare said nothing, just watched with molten eyes, her gaze disturbingly self-aware. Behind him, Ligipag rattled her tail along her leg scales, as she did sometimes when he tried talking to her. There were theories this was a sort of crow call between the dragons, but what it meant was as inscrutable as the language of the old world’s ravens.
“Are the people inside?” he asked, feeling a bizarre need to keep up the conversation. Like if the dragon just felt they were friends, it wouldn’t freeze him on the spot. “Did you used to live here? Decided to come back after the elder freed you?”
He took a hesitant step closer, trying to read this single dragon, like she was a Elyzan glyph-koan, meaning hidden in her twists and folds, if he could only make it out.
She moved again and he froze. Gently, she retracted her spread wing. It took him a moment to see what she held beneath her, trapped in the warm pocket between wing and belly.
The bard sucked in a breath. It Makina’s son—Kantalo, his name had been. And it looked like the boy still breathed.