Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Nonetheless, when the woman didn’t move, he handed the reins to Sephie and prepared to get down. “Be ready,” he said. “If it is a trap, we’ll sing a defensive shield.”
As he reached the ground, half a dozen men stepped out from behind trees, all as ragged and disheveled as the woman, who was clambering to her feet.
Taz sang a single note, and Sephie joined in. As their voices wove a melody, one of the ragged men shouted at them to stop. His burr was thick, and if they’d not spent the winter in Aberdeen, Taz might not have understood that he was calling on them to put their hands up or they’d be shot.
He grinned. Let them try. He leaped back up onto the driver’s seat and retrieved the reins from Sephie, without skipping a note.
The bandits must have been loath to actually kill their victims, for they sent a warning shot from their one rifle just as Taz signaled the horses to walk on.
The bullet slammed into the invisible defensive shield that now formed a bubble around the horses and the wagon.
The bandits tried rushing the wagon, hit the shield, and fell back, swearing.
They fired again, this time with both the rifle and the ancient shotgun one of them had.
The shield held, but the bandits didn’t give up, running beside the cart and shouting words he didn’t understand. By the tone, they were swearing.
Taz set the horses to a trot, hoping to shake off their unwanted company, and for a moment, he thought it had worked, for the bandits fell back, and then those he could still see broke for the trees.
Then his mind interpreted the word they were shouting, even as he realized that they had been looking up and pointing before they fled.
“Drèagon!” Dragon. And there he was, landing on the road before them, so that the horses shied and trembled.
Taz leapt down and ran to their heads to soothe them.
“Cousin Jasper,” called Sephie. “Good morning.”
The dragon dissolved into a mist of green and pinkish-red, and then reformed as a man, who presented them with his naked back as he picked up a satchel from the ground.
He must have been carrying it in his dragon form, for Taz had seen it fall from the mist. The dragon lord pulled out a robe and put it on before turning back toward them.
“Cousin Persephone,” he said. “And Cousin Tally, I must suppose?”
“Taliesin Ddraennen, my lord,” Taz replied. “But yes, I have the honor to be Sephie’s husband.”
Lord Baradine’s tawny eyes held Taz’s gaze for a long moment, and then he inclined his head. “Thank you for the information that saved the prince regent and his guests,” he said.
“Oh, I am so glad,” said Sephie. “We tried to find out what had happened from the newspapers, but it was frustratingly silent about any plot at all, let alone what happened to the red dragon and his supporters.”
“We assumed some news would have filtered north if the plot had succeeded,” Taz pointed out.
“Indeed,” said Lord Baradine, and then, “I didn’t think to look in the north of Scotland, until I felt your magic just now.
It is true that you are a bard mage pair, then.
” It was a statement, not a question. No doubt the dragon lord had already seen and understood their bond, which was a solid weaving of music that firmly linked the pair of them.
“Yes,” said Sephie. “The examiner was wrong.”
Lord Baradine managed a wintry smile. “As I told you,” he said.
There was silence for a moment, as Taz waited for the dragon lord to arrest them, or thank them, or whatever he had come there to do, and Lord Baradine stood in the middle of the road, gazing at the pair of them and their wagon.
“Can we offer you a cup of tea?” asked Sephie. She had a flair for the practical, did his lovely wife. Taz was relieved when Lord Baradine’s lip quirked in a fleeting smile, and he said, “Thank you. You may.”
“Perhaps on the other side of this wood,” suggested Taz. “I suspect those ragtag bandits are long gone, but I would prefer broader sight lines.”
And so, their third day on the road found them on a bluff over a valley, having tea with the man who had every right to regard them as the enemy. Yet, as Sephie asked after his wife and his children, and Lord Baradine asked where they had been and what their plans were, Taz could sense no threat.
Perhaps the dragon lord detected Taz’s continuing unease, for in the end, he said, “Taliesin, if I may call you so, you no doubt wish to know that I never reported Persephone’s spying, or yours.
My wife pointed out that no harm had been done.
In fact, by disclosing Lord Hebog’s plot, you are now my country’s benefactors.
He got caught in his own trap, by the way.
According to one of the conspirators we caught, his messenger disappeared, so he came to Brighton himself.
Unfortunately for him, his explosives blew up while he and the other leaders of his gang were present. ”
He was watching Taz intently as he said this, but Taz felt only relief, and a certain amount of curiosity about whether Lord Baradine had something to do with Hebog’s failure to escape.
“I do not agree with the murder of innocents,” he said. “But Hebog was not innocent.”
Lord Baradine nodded agreement.
Taz wanted to be clear. “My wife and I still believe in freedom for Wales,” he said.
“But not freedom to be oppressed by our own Cymru nobles. We want to work for a world where all people have a say in their own destiny. That might mean being able to vote for their own countrymen to sit in their own parliament. Or it might be as simple as being able to own the tools with which they earn their living.”
“That is the vision we sing,” Sephie explained. “That is our dream—to roam the roads of this island, singing peace and encouraging people to be kind to one another.”
“Stick to that,” advised Lord Baradine, “and I have no quarrel with you.”
After that, he unbent enough to propose that Taz, too, should call him Cousin Jasper, and when they parted, it was with his best wishes, his promise to pass on Sephie’s own good wishes to his wife, and an open invitation to visit whenever they were in the south of England.
“That will be some time away,” Taz said to Sephie, as they watched the dragon leap into the air and disappear from it perhaps a hundred yards above their heads. “We won’t be in Aberdeen until the end of the week.”
“No matter,” said his wife. “I am just glad to know that we shall be welcome.”
Taz kissed her. “You have me, beloved,” he pointed out.
“And you have me,” Sephie agreed, instantly. “And that is enough.”
THE END