14 #3
He had sometimes gotten a bit enamored of the women he paid, he had to admit. He had enjoyed giving them baubles and dresses and all manner of things of that nature. He had enjoyed giving them compliments, snuggling in against their bare skin and whispering soft things to them.
But even if a part of him had been serious about those things, he’d known that they only accepted such things from him because there was an arrangement.
He had never had a woman take him on without compensation.
He could not quite believe a woman would.
And she—Gathren—she obviously did not want him at all.
He could not fathom why she had even said that ridiculous thing, that she was in love with him?
She was not. She did not act at all as if she was in love with him.
She was snappish and peevish with him at every turn. Certainly, if a woman was in love…
Ah, but there it was.
She resented him.
He was a burden on her, an annoyance, an inconvenience, and her feelings for him, whatever they might be, were the same, and he had no notion how to prove to her that he was worth anything.
Partly this was because he did not personally feel as if he was worth anything, and he thought this was backed up by evidence, because he had never mattered to anyone.
He felt clumsy around her now, afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid to simply be.
Everything about being in love was appallingly bad.
He wanted nothing more to do with it.
They reached the mountains and then began to wind their way through the narrow paths that wound between the rise of the slopes.
Sometimes the roads were little more than a narrow ribbon of rocks and dirt, grass growing on either side, tree roots jutting across them.
They had to walk the horses more often than not.
They went a whole day like this, and he could see that the food was going to run low, that they had underestimated how long all this would take.
On the day after, however, they saw the blue dragon. It was circling overhead, further up in the mountains, and they watched and spoke to each other, quite animated, charting the path from here to there, talking of how they could get there, likely before nightfall if they started off now.
Then, the dragon careened down from its circling and spread its wings wide. It soared lower and lower, diving directly towards them, and they both realized it had seen them. It was coming straight for them.
Iahir wondered if this was it, if they were going to be burned to death right here as the dragon came for them, if these were his last moments in all of the land or sea.
But the dragon swooped right over their heads, and they were both stunned at the sheer size of it. It was huge, the wing span twice as wide as Iahir was tall. Its body was long, wormlike, but stretched out over them, it was breathtakingly large.
They cowered against a tree trunk, neither able to catch their breaths, for some time after it was gone.
“It went that way,” Gathren said eventually, pointing. “I wonder if that is the way we are to go.”
“I think not,” said Iahir. “I think it went that way entirely to throw us off.” He pointed. “You see that?”
She squinted. “No, what are you speaking of?”
He jammed his finger at the black spot in the mountain near where the dragon had been circling. “I think that’s a cavern entrance. I think that’s its lair. I think it deliberately did not go there because it does not want to draw us there.”
“Oh,” said Gathren. “Well, that might make sense.” She swallowed. “But if we start towards it, the dragon will likely see us, will it not? And then it will be even more aggressive in its attempts to dissuade us from coming there.”
“Perhaps,” he had to admit.
They were quiet, resting there, unsure of what to do next.
“Well, what if we tied the horses up down here, and made a camp,” said Iahir. “Then we could go up through the wooded area, and the dragon might not see us there, not if we remained under the trees.”
“That could work,’ she said. “But what if it kills our horses?”
Iahir gave her a sympathetic look. “You are quite taken with that horse, aren’t you?”
She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know why. I’ve never felt an affinity with a horse before, but this one… and I still have not named her.”
“Well, perhaps it’s better if she has no name if she is sacrificed to the dragon,” said Iahir.
“Do not say such things! Not my horse.”
“Would you rather the horse or your mother?” He was pointed.
She did not answer, but her expression was now cold and determined. “All right, let’s try it.”
They spent a good bit of time making up their camp area, leaving it in such a way that it might be believable that they were coming right back any moment, and they set it up in a place where it would be quite obvious from the air.
It was so well done and so deliberate that Iahir began to worry that perhaps it would be too obvious and the dragon would know they intended to deceive it.
By all accounts, dragons were intelligent creatures.
They were capable of mastering speech, and they had their own languages.
In the stories, of course, the dragons always spoke the elvish language, but he sort of wondered which one.
Back during the times of those stories, back during the times of the treaties, the old Cirdan language was still spoken, but almost no one spoke it anymore.
For a time, the clergy were all well-versed in it, because there were a number of old religious texts that had been written in it.
But now, almost all of that had been translated, and the books had been printed on printing presses and bound, and he knew that the clergy was supposed to learn Cirdan, that there were classes on it in school.
But he also knew that there were a number of things he was supposed to have learned in his schooling.
And he had mostly memorized it and then immediately forgotten it after being tested on it.
Anyway, the point was that the dragon would be intelligent enough to puzzle out whatever it is that they had done here.
He began to think that their better bet might be to move as quickly through the woods as possible, to get to the cavern entrance before the dragon came back.
So, he pushed them, urging her, saying they must take a quicker route, even though it was steep and required them to climb up rock ledges, pulling themselves up by grasping onto trees that were growing here and there, scrambling over roots and leaves and branches—
And then they weren’t quick enough, anyway.
The dragon came back, and they went still in the woods, huddling together under the branches of a particularly large tree as they watched it circle their camp and then fly higher and higher, as if searching for them.
The dragon flew around, out of their view, blocked by the slope that rose up in front of them, and it seemingly disappeared.
They could see the opening to the cavern that they had thought was its lair from here. The dragon did not enter there.
They had a conversation in low voices.
“Perhaps I was wrong,” said Iahir. “Perhaps that’s not its lair at all.”
“Or perhaps there is another entrance,” she said. “A hidden entrance, one it is confident we will not find. Perhaps it went in there.”
“Could be,” he said.
“We have come this far,” she said. “We need to investigate that cavern.”
“All right,” he decided. “I suppose you’re right.”
They had to exit the woods and go out into the open for nearly one hundred feet to get from the edge of the woods to the entrance to the cavern. It had looked like no distance at all from below, but here, standing at the edge of the woods, it seemed a vast amount of distance.
Iahir could just picture the dragon popping right up, breathing fire on them both, or worse—picking up Gathren and flying off with her, taking her Ornhil-knew-where, and he would be useless to find her.
But nothing like that happened.
They rushed across to the cavern entrance, and once inside, they could see right away that it was the dragons’ lair. It was a hoard. They walked three feet inside and there were golden coins and trinkets and glimmering jewels scattered over the floor.
And then, five more feet inside, there was a heap of such things, crowns and necklaces and free jewels and goblets and ever so many coins, all piled on top of each other.
He could barely breathe. It was exactly like the stories. He had not thought such a thing might be possible, for how could one winged creature gather up so many shiny things and put them all in one spot like this? He had thought it must all be pretend.
He and Gathren sorted through the loot, turning things over, gasping to each other, both stunned by it.
How much would all this be worth, he wondered?
And what could one even do with riches such as this?
For Iahir knew that a jewel was only worth whatever someone might pay for it.
In a desperate situation, one might let something precious go for far less than it was worth.
The dragon was using it for nothing, for nothing at all, just to have piled here in this cavern. Why did dragons even want these things?
Gathren shook herself. “No, I do not care about any of these things. I am here looking for my mother.”
“Right,” said Iahir. Right. How long had they stood here, sorting through these coins and crowns and jewels, after all? It was as if a spell had settled over them, a spell of greed. That was like the stories, too.
Gathren moved around the mound of gold and jewels, and he came with her.
A wall of fire emanated out from deeper in the cavern. The heat was tremendous. He could see the outline of Gathren against that bright orange bloom of flame.
He let out a hoarse shriek.