dragon bard (beta)
Chapter three: kaden windsdirge
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 chuckled. “Guilty as charged, Kaden Windsanthem.”
“Dirge,” his mother corrected, like she always did. “Windsdirge.”
“Ah. Excuse me,” the bard said, and Kaden marveled at the resonance in his voice, even after all these years. The man was sixty if he was a day, his silver beard only freckled with red, and still sounded like he was fresh from the imperial amphitheater. Kaden colored, thinking of some of the things Yelia Snowslilt had said of the bard’s past.
“—always getting it wrong with you song tribes,” the bard was saying, leading his dragon by touch rather than the harness most people used when traveling.
“You don’t use a harness?” Kaden blurted out. “Neither do I! The dragons don’t like them. Especially northern stock.” The bard’s dragon had the coppery scales of dragons raised near the coast.
“Don’t use a lull either, to be honest,” he said, clicking at his mare in countertime to the caldera’s lull. “Except when I’m sleeping. More fun that way.” The bard winked.
Kaden’s mother cleared her throat, frowning at them both. “Well. If you’d like to come out of the cold, we have space for your mare, and porridge if you’ve not eaten.”
“I would appreciate it,” the bard said, following her lead through the rimrock, his mare following him almost as naturally as Galesea did.
Kaden reached a hand out absently, stroking his hand across his dragon’s scales, the rings on his fingers clicking against them. “Amazing, isn’t he girl? A real life legend.”
She flared her neck scales.
“Well I think he’s amazing.”
The rings were beginning to glow in the sky by the time they got the bard’s mare settled and the guest room ready, amber evening light tracing the western rim of the caldera. They shared a beet stew in the central sitting room, Makina and the bard making light conversation on news from the old world, of the sugarcane harvest and royal house scandals and the season’s new songs. They both got that faraway look in their eyes that older people and new settlers got, remembering a place he’d only ever heard of, a place of thawed ground and wild grass gardens that stretched in every direction. He would see it someday.
“And news more locally?” Makina asked, reclining against the woven backrest of her chair. “What brings you this far south?”
She always asked that, even though there were plenty of calderas settled south of them now. Like she wanted to believe they were on the edge of the world.
The bard sighed, settling his bowl down on the table. “You—are loyal to the crown, yes?”
“As any settler must be,” his mother said in even tones.
“But, perhaps, more a family of the ice than the old world, these days?”
Kaden frowned. It was an odd question, and his mother seemed to be searching for words.
“Excuse me,” the bard said. “Not my place to pry. A song, maybe, for my supper. There is a new ballad from Portown—a contender for the continental crown, if my ear is any judge.”
Kaden would have scoffed at the idea of a continental crown—as if any songwriting competition on the ice could compare to the imperial laurels the old world awarded its best bards. Would have, if Alumag Stormchant wasn’t about to sing. He leaned forward instead. Here was a man who had won those imperial laurels. Who had been the first to lull dragons with his songs. And he was going to sing.
The lute he pulled from his furs was as worn as it was beautiful—dark mahogany inlaid with mother-of-pearl filigree, worn bare between the frets and glossy resin frosted with a lifetime of bumps and scrapes along its edges. The first plucked notes rolled rich and smooth from its cavity, resonating against the house’s curving iron walls. The song had the taste of the ice about it—a steady, driving beat accented with double-time bridges and rhythmic lulls before the chorus. Then the bard began to sing, and Kaden lost all thought of song composition in the sheer artistry of his voice, the texture his age gave to the notes, the nuance he lent to every note in the melody, and the effortless way his weathered fingers flew over the fretboard during the verse and resolution.
His mother snapped politely when the last notes had died, but it took Kaden a few breaths to remember he should react, other than internally.
“That was,” he started. “You—” Words failed him. The bard had sung.
“Thank you,” the bard said, waving a hand at their words. “I do think it’s a worthy tune. Gaining some ground even in the old world halls, or so I’m told.”
“A worthy tune indeed,” his mother said, and the careful tone to her voice, like when a visitor was offering a trade and she didn’t know who had the advantage, snapped him the rest of the way out of the song’s reverie. “Though I don’t know that the imperial courts would approve of it, without some revision.”
“Indeed,” the bard said, leaning his lute gently against the table. “I thought it might find more receptive ears this far into the ice.”
Kaden frowned. Who wouldn’t approve of that? He ran back over the song, trying to find the subtext to their strange conversation. Only then did the words register—it was a ballad about a ranger caught between loyalty to the crown and her love for a man of the ice, whose family had been driven to poverty by the increasing greed of imperial taxation. Not a song for the national halls, indeed. And likely not a song chosen at random on the bard’s part.
He sucked in a breath, heart beating faster. Was the bard a revolutionary too?
“And so it does,” his mother said finally. He doubted anyone else would hear the subtle note of reservation in it. Makina rarely complained about imperial taxes the way they did in neighboring calderas, but Kaden knew she harbored no love for the old world. So why the reservation?
“Then,” the bard said, shoulders dropping like Galesea’s did when a perceived danger abated, “I do indeed have news to share. There is a congress in Portown in one week’s time, to discuss the new leather and sugar levies.”
“Mmm,” his mother said, getting up to fetch the kettle from where it heated in the joint between Galesea’s front leg and her belly, steam rising from the top. “To discuss how to draw the empress’s wrath, then,” she said on turning.
“Or to find some way to reason with her ministries,” the bard said, watching as she filled their old set of leather-wrapped iron mugs, the exotic scent of cinnamon rising in the steam. They only used the precious spice for guests. “It does not have to lead to violence.”
“It does,” Makina said simply, setting the kettle down and taking her own cup. “And when it does, we have no kind of militia that could stand up to the rangers.”
The bard lifted his eyebrows. “Many of those rangers are ice-born these days, and others are like the man in the song, with more connections to our continent than theirs.”
Kaden narrowed his eyes. The bard was old world born—everyone his age was—but he called it theirs rather than ours. This was something beyond the muttered complaints he’d heard in other calderas. He was a revolutionary.
“Do you think we really could break free?” he asked, leaning forward. “Like in the old songs?”
“No,” his mother snapped, though her frown was directed at the bard. “The rangers are the least of our worry, if it comes to open sedition. The empire has far worse than that, and all a meeting does is draw targets on the heads of those who attend.”
“Unless it is an open congress,” the bard agreed amicably. “Public and for the purposes of diplomacy. Let them come, and hear a unified voice for the concerns of the ice. The only way I can see it failing is if level heads are not there to ensure it goes smoothly.”
His mother’s hands stilled where they worked at the leather cording of her chair. “You will be there, I take it?”
“I have other concerns,” he sighed. “And there are wiser voices on the ice than mine.”
The look he gave Kaden’s mother was unmistakable. Her face, in contrast, was as much a mask as he’d ever seen it.
“And what are those other concerns?” she asked.
The light in the bard’s eyes dimmed. “You’ve heard of the attacks? The calderas frozen over?”
“I have heard more than usual have been lost lately,” his mother said, “but not whether they were attacks or malfunctions.”
“They were attacks,” the bard said, gazing into the steam rising from his cup. “At least, so far as I can tell. I have been to ten of the seventeen, some of them before the frost had melted. They were not malfunctions.”
Kaden’s hands went cold on the hot mug, and he glanced at Galesea. “Wildling attacks?”
“I do not know what else they could be. There are never signs of struggle, and the entire calderas are frozen over, as only one of the wild beasts could do.”
The bigger the dragon, the more heat it could draw out of something, or put into it. He had seen Galesea freeze a circle of ice five paces around her in every direction, but a whole caldera? It would take a dragon fifty times her size to do that.
“They were large colonies?” his mother asked. “Lots of dragons?”
“Some,” the bard said, still gazing at the steam. “Some smaller.”
“None as small as ours,” she insisted. “We only have eight dragons here.”
“Eleven,” Kaden said, “including the hatchlings.”
“Eleven, then. Still a far cry from Tumbaga’s six hundred. Surely that is what’s angering them. That we keep them confined. That we harvest them.”
Kaden shifted in his seat, glancing again at Galesea, as if she could understand. Dragon herding was the only way they could survive out here—not only for food, but for heat, for labor, and for the temperature-regulating ability dragon blood imparted. And yet, it did feel wrong. The dragons were meant to be more than this. Galesea was meant to be more than this. And sometimes she was, though that was nothing he could talk about here.
“That is all I can reason as well,” the bard said, “and yet the pieces don’t quite fit. Why would they start now, after thirty years of peace?”
Makina sipped at her tea. “There have been attacks since the beginning, as I understand it.”
“A few a year, some of them likely malfunctions. But we had five last year, and twelve already this year. At this rate—” He swallowed. “But I don’t need to bother you with such things. Kaden here seems to have a fine hand with the dragons, and as you say, you are smaller than any known attack sites. You’ll be fine.”
“And if they came,” Kaden said, chest swelling under the bard’s compliment, “Galesea would protect us.”
His mother opened her mouth, no doubt to apologize for him, but the bard cocked an eyebrow. “Protect you? How?”
“She would tell them we mean no harm.”
The bard eyed him, then glanced back at the dragon. “You think the beasts can talk to each other?”
“Of course they can. How else would they coordinate territory inside the calderas the way they do?”
The bard narrowed his eyes. “Interesting.”
Makina cleared her throat. “Well. It’s late, and I’m sure you’ll want to be getting on in the morning.”
The bard looked almost startled at this. “Yes. I’m sure I do. Thank you, for your hospitality. You have a washroom I might use? I’ve been five days on the ice since my last stopover.”
“Of course.” She stood to lead him that way.
The bard stood too, nodding to Kaden. “You can play it, if you like,” he said, gesturing at the lute leaning against the iron table. “I saw you eyeing it. Just mind the capstan, it wasn’t designed for our iron strings.”
Kaden goggled, hands already itching to try it out. The bard’s own lute?
“And think on what I said, Makina,” he continued as she lead him toward the washroom. “The congress could use someone with your experience. And your devotion to the ice.”
Kaden paused, lute already in hand, to listen for her answer, but if any came, it was too low to hear. She didn’t want to go, that was clear. Why anyone would want to miss the excitement of Portown, and joining a rebel congress, he would never understand. Besides, there would be settlers fresh from the old world there, and new songs—maybe even initial rounds of the continental songwriting contest.
Kaden smiled, hands poised over the lute. If she didn’t want to go, then he would.
“Dirge,” his mother corrected, like she always did. “Windsdirge.”
“Ah. Excuse me,” the bard said, and Kaden marveled at the resonance in his voice, even after all these years. The man was sixty if he was a day, his silver beard only freckled with red, and still sounded like he was fresh from the imperial amphitheater. Kaden colored, thinking of some of the things Yelia Snowslilt had said of the bard’s past.
“—always getting it wrong with you song tribes,” the bard was saying, leading his dragon by touch rather than the harness most people used when traveling.
“You don’t use a harness?” Kaden blurted out. “Neither do I! The dragons don’t like them. Especially northern stock.” The bard’s dragon had the coppery scales of dragons raised near the coast.
“Don’t use a lull either, to be honest,” he said, clicking at his mare in countertime to the caldera’s lull. “Except when I’m sleeping. More fun that way.” The bard winked.
Kaden’s mother cleared her throat, frowning at them both. “Well. If you’d like to come out of the cold, we have space for your mare, and porridge if you’ve not eaten.”
“I would appreciate it,” the bard said, following her lead through the rimrock, his mare following him almost as naturally as Galesea did.
Kaden reached a hand out absently, stroking his hand across his dragon’s scales, the rings on his fingers clicking against them. “Amazing, isn’t he girl? A real life legend.”
She flared her neck scales.
“Well I think he’s amazing.”
The rings were beginning to glow in the sky by the time they got the bard’s mare settled and the guest room ready, amber evening light tracing the western rim of the caldera. They shared a beet stew in the central sitting room, Makina and the bard making light conversation on news from the old world, of the sugarcane harvest and royal house scandals and the season’s new songs. They both got that faraway look in their eyes that older people and new settlers got, remembering a place he’d only ever heard of, a place of thawed ground and wild grass gardens that stretched in every direction. He would see it someday.
“And news more locally?” Makina asked, reclining against the woven backrest of her chair. “What brings you this far south?”
She always asked that, even though there were plenty of calderas settled south of them now. Like she wanted to believe they were on the edge of the world.
The bard sighed, settling his bowl down on the table. “You—are loyal to the crown, yes?”
“As any settler must be,” his mother said in even tones.
“But, perhaps, more a family of the ice than the old world, these days?”
Kaden frowned. It was an odd question, and his mother seemed to be searching for words.
“Excuse me,” the bard said. “Not my place to pry. A song, maybe, for my supper. There is a new ballad from Portown—a contender for the continental crown, if my ear is any judge.”
Kaden would have scoffed at the idea of a continental crown—as if any songwriting competition on the ice could compare to the imperial laurels the old world awarded its best bards. Would have, if Alumag Stormchant wasn’t about to sing. He leaned forward instead. Here was a man who had won those imperial laurels. Who had been the first to lull dragons with his songs. And he was going to sing.
The lute he pulled from his furs was as worn as it was beautiful—dark mahogany inlaid with mother-of-pearl filigree, worn bare between the frets and glossy resin frosted with a lifetime of bumps and scrapes along its edges. The first plucked notes rolled rich and smooth from its cavity, resonating against the house’s curving iron walls. The song had the taste of the ice about it—a steady, driving beat accented with double-time bridges and rhythmic lulls before the chorus. Then the bard began to sing, and Kaden lost all thought of song composition in the sheer artistry of his voice, the texture his age gave to the notes, the nuance he lent to every note in the melody, and the effortless way his weathered fingers flew over the fretboard during the verse and resolution.
His mother snapped politely when the last notes had died, but it took Kaden a few breaths to remember he should react, other than internally.
“That was,” he started. “You—” Words failed him. The bard had sung.
“Thank you,” the bard said, waving a hand at their words. “I do think it’s a worthy tune. Gaining some ground even in the old world halls, or so I’m told.”
“A worthy tune indeed,” his mother said, and the careful tone to her voice, like when a visitor was offering a trade and she didn’t know who had the advantage, snapped him the rest of the way out of the song’s reverie. “Though I don’t know that the imperial courts would approve of it, without some revision.”
“Indeed,” the bard said, leaning his lute gently against the table. “I thought it might find more receptive ears this far into the ice.”
Kaden frowned. Who wouldn’t approve of that? He ran back over the song, trying to find the subtext to their strange conversation. Only then did the words register—it was a ballad about a ranger caught between loyalty to the crown and her love for a man of the ice, whose family had been driven to poverty by the increasing greed of imperial taxation. Not a song for the national halls, indeed. And likely not a song chosen at random on the bard’s part.
He sucked in a breath, heart beating faster. Was the bard a revolutionary too?
“And so it does,” his mother said finally. He doubted anyone else would hear the subtle note of reservation in it. Makina rarely complained about imperial taxes the way they did in neighboring calderas, but Kaden knew she harbored no love for the old world. So why the reservation?
“Then,” the bard said, shoulders dropping like Galesea’s did when a perceived danger abated, “I do indeed have news to share. There is a congress in Portown in one week’s time, to discuss the new leather and sugar levies.”
“Mmm,” his mother said, getting up to fetch the kettle from where it heated in the joint between Galesea’s front leg and her belly, steam rising from the top. “To discuss how to draw the empress’s wrath, then,” she said on turning.
“Or to find some way to reason with her ministries,” the bard said, watching as she filled their old set of leather-wrapped iron mugs, the exotic scent of cinnamon rising in the steam. They only used the precious spice for guests. “It does not have to lead to violence.”
“It does,” Makina said simply, setting the kettle down and taking her own cup. “And when it does, we have no kind of militia that could stand up to the rangers.”
The bard lifted his eyebrows. “Many of those rangers are ice-born these days, and others are like the man in the song, with more connections to our continent than theirs.”
Kaden narrowed his eyes. The bard was old world born—everyone his age was—but he called it theirs rather than ours. This was something beyond the muttered complaints he’d heard in other calderas. He was a revolutionary.
“Do you think we really could break free?” he asked, leaning forward. “Like in the old songs?”
“No,” his mother snapped, though her frown was directed at the bard. “The rangers are the least of our worry, if it comes to open sedition. The empire has far worse than that, and all a meeting does is draw targets on the heads of those who attend.”
“Unless it is an open congress,” the bard agreed amicably. “Public and for the purposes of diplomacy. Let them come, and hear a unified voice for the concerns of the ice. The only way I can see it failing is if level heads are not there to ensure it goes smoothly.”
His mother’s hands stilled where they worked at the leather cording of her chair. “You will be there, I take it?”
“I have other concerns,” he sighed. “And there are wiser voices on the ice than mine.”
The look he gave Kaden’s mother was unmistakable. Her face, in contrast, was as much a mask as he’d ever seen it.
“And what are those other concerns?” she asked.
The light in the bard’s eyes dimmed. “You’ve heard of the attacks? The calderas frozen over?”
“I have heard more than usual have been lost lately,” his mother said, “but not whether they were attacks or malfunctions.”
“They were attacks,” the bard said, gazing into the steam rising from his cup. “At least, so far as I can tell. I have been to ten of the seventeen, some of them before the frost had melted. They were not malfunctions.”
Kaden’s hands went cold on the hot mug, and he glanced at Galesea. “Wildling attacks?”
“I do not know what else they could be. There are never signs of struggle, and the entire calderas are frozen over, as only one of the wild beasts could do.”
The bigger the dragon, the more heat it could draw out of something, or put into it. He had seen Galesea freeze a circle of ice five paces around her in every direction, but a whole caldera? It would take a dragon fifty times her size to do that.
“They were large colonies?” his mother asked. “Lots of dragons?”
“Some,” the bard said, still gazing at the steam. “Some smaller.”
“None as small as ours,” she insisted. “We only have eight dragons here.”
“Eleven,” Kaden said, “including the hatchlings.”
“Eleven, then. Still a far cry from Tumbaga’s six hundred. Surely that is what’s angering them. That we keep them confined. That we harvest them.”
Kaden shifted in his seat, glancing again at Galesea, as if she could understand. Dragon herding was the only way they could survive out here—not only for food, but for heat, for labor, and for the temperature-regulating ability dragon blood imparted. And yet, it did feel wrong. The dragons were meant to be more than this. Galesea was meant to be more than this. And sometimes she was, though that was nothing he could talk about here.
“That is all I can reason as well,” the bard said, “and yet the pieces don’t quite fit. Why would they start now, after thirty years of peace?”
Makina sipped at her tea. “There have been attacks since the beginning, as I understand it.”
“A few a year, some of them likely malfunctions. But we had five last year, and twelve already this year. At this rate—” He swallowed. “But I don’t need to bother you with such things. Kaden here seems to have a fine hand with the dragons, and as you say, you are smaller than any known attack sites. You’ll be fine.”
“And if they came,” Kaden said, chest swelling under the bard’s compliment, “Galesea would protect us.”
His mother opened her mouth, no doubt to apologize for him, but the bard cocked an eyebrow. “Protect you? How?”
“She would tell them we mean no harm.”
The bard eyed him, then glanced back at the dragon. “You think the beasts can talk to each other?”
“Of course they can. How else would they coordinate territory inside the calderas the way they do?”
The bard narrowed his eyes. “Interesting.”
Makina cleared her throat. “Well. It’s late, and I’m sure you’ll want to be getting on in the morning.”
The bard looked almost startled at this. “Yes. I’m sure I do. Thank you, for your hospitality. You have a washroom I might use? I’ve been five days on the ice since my last stopover.”
“Of course.” She stood to lead him that way.
The bard stood too, nodding to Kaden. “You can play it, if you like,” he said, gesturing at the lute leaning against the iron table. “I saw you eyeing it. Just mind the capstan, it wasn’t designed for our iron strings.”
Kaden goggled, hands already itching to try it out. The bard’s own lute?
“And think on what I said, Makina,” he continued as she lead him toward the washroom. “The congress could use someone with your experience. And your devotion to the ice.”
Kaden paused, lute already in hand, to listen for her answer, but if any came, it was too low to hear. She didn’t want to go, that was clear. Why anyone would want to miss the excitement of Portown, and joining a rebel congress, he would never understand. Besides, there would be settlers fresh from the old world there, and new songs—maybe even initial rounds of the continental songwriting contest.
Kaden smiled, hands poised over the lute. If she didn’t want to go, then he would.
