Ice and Smoke

Prologue-2

“I don’t want to fight. But knights will come, and I will defend myself.”

“Or you could release me, and save yourself the trouble.” “I cannot.”

“Why not?”

He rubbed his head wearily. “While you are here, you may do as you like. Don’t bother trying to leave—there is an enchanted circle around this tower, one mile from end to end. I am the only one who can cross it.”

“What would happen if I tried?”

“Nothing more than if you tried to walk through a stone wall.

You cannot pass, that is all. Now come, I will show you to your room.”

He took a torch from the edge of the parapet, led the way to a trapdoor, and down the stairway beneath it. The room below contained only cobwebs and grime, and I felt my throat close—this was to be my chamber? But no, the dragon walked on, down another twist in the spiral stair.

“Here,” he said. “There is bread, cheese and ale by the window.”

A bed with red velvet hangings, a fur rug, a water basin, a chair and small table by the window, and a fireplace, unlit. Not much, certainly, compared to my chamber at home, but it satisfied the necessities.

The dragon stepped past me and bent to light the fireplace with his torch, which he then blew out. I hadn’t known it was possible to blow out a torch with one breath.

“Goodnight, Princess.”

There was no point, I supposed, in being rude. “Goodnight, Sir Dragon.”

“Rindargeth.” “What?”

He said the word again, slowly and carefully. “Rindargeth. That is my call-name.”

“Rin-dar-geth,” I repeated. “Goodnight, Rindargeth.”

He closed the door behind him, leaving me alone in the dim, sparse chamber that would be my home for now.

Just for now, I told myself. Not forever. Not for very long at all.

****

I delayed opening my eyes when I woke, hoping it had all been a dream—but on opening them at last, admitted that the circular chamber with its sparse and battered furnishings could not be mistaken for my home. I rose, firmly reminding myself that tears would serve no purpose.

I found clothing in a chest—plain and ill-fitting, but clean—and more bread and cheese left for my breakfast. And then, opening what I had taken for a tall shuttered window, I found a balcony.

And below it, the sea.

I had seen lakes, rivers, and millponds aplenty, and despite all the sailors’ songs had not thought the sea could be much more impressive than they. I was wrong. The sea was to a millpond what a dragon was to a house-lizard. It stretched away to the edge of the sky, a great plain of glittering blue, and below my balcony it did not meet the shore so much as attack it, great fists of water pummeling the sand and rocks at the foot of the cliff where the tower stood. I realized I had been hearing the rhythmic sound of the waves for some time without noticing, waves and a constant salt-scented rush of wind that pushed white birds in circles above the water, and rippled patterns across the tall grasses that edged the sand.

I was a very long way from home.

I descended the stairs, finding more dirty and abandoned chambers, but the bottom floor was intact. Mismatched chairs and tables sat before a grand but unlit fireplace. Still no sign of the dragon.

I ventured out of doors.

With salt wind tangling my hair and the pounding of waves louder than ever, I found grassy hills, a few hunched and twisted trees, two half-fallen outbuildings—one I figured for a kitchen, and the other a stable. This place had surely been abandoned for many, many years. Beyond that, the grass flowed unimpeded to a dark ridge of forest at the crest of the furthest hill.

Rindargeth had spoken of a circle that would keep me in. How far did it extend? Could I escape it while he was away? I began walking toward the forest, keeping an eye on the sky for any dark- winged shape, but other than the occasional bird or rustling rodent, I was quite alone.

In fact, I realized as I walked, the sun hot on my back, I had seldom been so alone in my life. A princess always had attendants—Tegwen, servants, tutors, playmates, the castle guards. Now I had no one.

I tried to keep my breath calm, and moved faster toward the line of trees.

I made it just into the shade of the trees—winded and sweating, my delicate royal slippers torn by the rough ground—before I walked headlong into a wall.

I couldn’t see it at all. The air was perfectly clear. But my aching forehead was proof that it was there, and when I reached out my hands I could feel it clearly, smooth and hard as glass. I couldn’t break it, not by kicking it, or ramming it with my shoulder. Trying to move softly and gently through it, as if hoping it wouldn’t notice me, did not work either.

Along the ground where the invisible wall began, I realized, was a line of red-and-orange flowers, tiny but brilliantly colored. I couldn’t touch them through the wall, and neither could the wind, since they didn’t move no matter how hard it blew—yet in all other ways air seemed to move through the wall without difficulty, grass and leaves on the other side moving as naturally as ever.

The flowers, I had to assume, were the circle.

I followed the wall, my right hand gliding along its invisible surface, hoping for a gap, a c***k, anything.

And what would I do if I found one? It had taken the dragon the better part of a day and night to fly here. Would I walk back to Caibryn, all alone and barefoot (these slippers wouldn’t last the day), with no food or water, no weapons, no idea even which way to go?

Yes. I lifted my chin. If that is the only way to get home, then yes. I will not simply sit in a tower and wait for someone to rescue me. Especially since it could be months or…or years before…I swallowed tears—they wouldn’t help me—and kept walking.

Eventually, the circle led me to the beach, the red flowers continuing across sand and down into the water. I sat down to rest, letting the breeze cool me and the very edge of the water lick my feet.

The sea was astonishingly loud, and violent, all bluster and crash. It was all too easy to imagine my own drowned body tumbling in the heavy waves. I told myself to watch the little brown sand-birds, so much smaller and more fragile than I, and how fearlessly they approached the water. After several minutes passed and none of them died from their stupidity, I tried to believe that the sea was not so very dangerous after all. I walked along the shore, the tower’s cliff rising behind me, and waded out until the water washed against my ankles, pulling at the sand beneath my feet.

Surely my best hope was that the circle ended somewhere out in the water, either unable to sustain itself there, or judged unnecessary. And the dragon could return at any time. I couldn’t afford to wait.

Trying not to let my knees shake, I put my hand on the invisible wall, and followed it into the water. Waves pushed and pulled at me like large, ill-behaved children, tangling my water-logged skirts, slipping between my feet and the sandy bottom, splashing my face with salt that burned my eyes and nose and throat. Blinded and choking, I lost my grip on the smooth wall of the circle and was tumbled like a stone through the water.

It was even worse than being taken by the dragon. After all, I had been able to figure fairly quickly that he didn’t intend to eat me. The sea—the sea was trying its very best to eat me.

I don’t know how long I thrashed and foundered in panic, straining toward the sunlight; it couldn’t have been as long as it felt, or I would certainly have drowned. Instead I fetched up against a rock at the foot of the cliff, and clung there with all my strength, despite the waves that continually shouldered past me as if determined to jar me loose.

A shadow fell over me, and I looked up to see the dragon’s wide wings beating the air above my head.

Gently, he gathered me in one massive claw and carried me back to shore. Once I was safely on the ground, he stepped back from me and exhaled the cloud of smoke and sparks I had seen before, which enveloped him and then cleared, leaving him in his human shape.

Without a word, he carried me inside, settled me in a lounge-chair, and lit the fireplace.

“Are you satisfied, then,” he said, tucking a blanket gently around me, “that the circle is as I described?”

“I suppose I must be,” I said, through a throat still choked with saltwater, but it was a lie. I had not been able to establish one way or the other whether the circle ended in the water, and though the idea terrified me, I knew I would be trying again.

Rindargeth handed me bread and a cup of ale, grumbling under his breath. “Tomorrow I must teach you to swim. Next time, I might not be able to fish you out soon enough.”

I glanced at him sideways. “Such concern for your captive.”

He said nothing. If his lined, leathery face held an expression, I could not decipher it.

“Have you been following me all day?” I asked. “I never saw you.”

“I spent the day on the top of the tower.” He sat down on the hearth, poking the fire higher. “I can see farther than a man, even when shaped like one, so I watched you. I saw no reason to interfere with you unless you were hurt. Or tried to drown yourself.”

“You didn’t answer my question last night,” I said. “Why have you brought me here?”

“This place is far from people, abandoned for years. It will be easy to hide you here.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Have you never heard that dragons are secretive?”

“No, I have never heard that. Large and strong, yes. Dangerous, extremely. Possessive, violent, bad-tempered. But secretive? No.”

Did an expression flicker then? One rather like Tegwen’s when I was pestering her?

“This dragon,” he said at last, “is secretive.”

“And this dragon,” I said, “will keep me here despite the danger to his own life and the utter lack of advantage to himself. He seeks no battle with knights. He possesses no treasure for me to curate. He appears to have no collection of other maidens. Or am I merely the first?”

He snorted. “God forbid. I expect you will be plenty.” “Do you intend to ransom me to my father?”

“I do not.”

“Then what reason have you for doing this?” “My reasons are my own.”

“Or perhaps they are someone else’s.”

A startled glance from him, and silence, with only the fire crackling.

“By Jove,” I said, wondering. “That is the truth. You have a master.”

“Who would presume to be master of a dragon?”

“I do not know, but you must have some reason for abducting me—and yet you have no reason at all. It must be someone else’s reason, someone who may command you to do his will.”

He was silent.

“Someone,” I ventured, “you are, perhaps, f*******n to speak of?”

If an expression lurked in his features now, it might have been amusement, or relief. “If such a man existed, I might advise him that, in taking you, he had bitten off more than he could chew.”