The Seasons of Salt

Chapter Three

Lord Maxon Rowley looked up sharply. He thought he had seen a movement, down there between those two great rock lips where no movement ought to be.

Rowley was on edge and he knew it. He had good reason to be. They had spent the best part of a three-week slowly creeping along the rocky terrain unseen. It had taken longer than he would have liked, longer than it should have done, and only today, on one of their four holy days, Morti Morturi, had they finally reached the lip of the mountain precipice. He did not know if that was a good omen or an ill one, but it set the men to muttering. A day when they ought to be celebrating their ancestors. Instead they were going to be joining them.

Rowley thought distantly of the celebrations sure to be happening back home, the celebrations he might well never taste again, for every man here knew full well that they could be going to their death--twice over, in fact. For even if they were successful in ousting the dragons, and the ancestors knew that such a thing felt all the more unlikely now that they were sitting at the foot of the mountain caves, if Dowse was not successful in holding his end, if Glengower did not have enough might to push Ferris clear, if Tulliver could not keep the hags bound in the wasteland woods, if Harble decided he did want to take an interest after all and came creeping inland behind them – if, if, if. Well. Mayhap they might wish they had not been successful after all. It was technically treason, after all, to break an accord the king had set. But Ferris was sitting pretty down on the Brenin Penisula, separated from the mainland by all but a thin causeway. It was all very well for him to set accords, when his folk were not the ones paying blood by them.

No. One way or another, it all had to end tonight. Which was easy to say, when you were rousing your men to battle. It was another thing entirely when you were waiting on the precipice of death. So, all in all, he thought he was well within his rights to make sure everything was perfect, before he led his men over into the edge, past the point of no return.

Rowley was not given to doubt as a rule, but something felt off now. His intuition was scratching at him, like a scab that had started to flake, or a briar caught under the lip of his boot. Something was wrong. This whole damn business was wrong, if it came to it, but there was nothing much he could do about that now. An oath was an oath, and it would be held sacred.

Like the oaths you held to Royce Hagwhore? His conscience asked wryly. He ignored it.

“Stay here. Hold the men,” he snapped to his neighbour, Burne, in an undertone. “There is something I must see to before we start.”

He had to be certain-sure.

Burne leered at him knowingly, about to make some crude jape about fearful bladders on battle’s eve no doubt, but Maxon had strode off before Burne had gathered his wits enough to frame it into coherence.

There it was – another movement between the crevices of the rocks. The midnight moon shone brightly down upon the rocks and Maxon drew his sword, silent and stealthy. Féon would be starting the ceremony back at Grimkeep by now. Mayhap even taking Ryland and Little Erilla down to the crypts with her. The bells would be chiming out across the courtyard, the twelfth chime when the dead could cross the veil to be with their loved ones again, and he was here alone.

The black-gold blade glinted darkly in the night glimmer; rare and expensive and usually too precious to risk in open war-fare, but it was perfect for such a night-time raid as this. It was said a fire-beasts’ eyesight was three times better than a man’s. He supposed tonight they would discover the truth of it. Rowley hefted its reassuring weight in his hand and crept forwards. There was a man sitting calmly upon the boulders, his back to Rowley. His head was tilted up towards the sky and he was bathed in shadow but he seemed to wear no armour, no chain-mail, no helm.

It must be a dragon, body-bound to human form. A spy, mayhap. A sentry.

A liability that had to be dealt with.

As silent as death itself, he leapt forwards and plunged his blade through the man’s back. The blade went through far too easily, as though the man was nothing but smoke. The man turned, not the least bit disconcerted.

“There are laws against p*******e, Maxon. I thought you had more honour than that,” he said sternly. Maxon let out a hoarse yell and sank to his knees, dropping his sword.

His father stood up with that stern frown Maxon so well recalled. His face was as smooth and unblemished as it had been when he was alive, not that charred and scarred mess that had been returned to them to be crypted. Maxon had been barely more than a youth when it happened, but it was a sight he’d not forget until death finally took him. How could it be, then, that Brullim Rowley was standing here once more, whole and unscathed?

“I have lost my wits. This is a trick.”

“It is neither,” his father said impatiently. “Take your feet, Maxon. Show some pride. Remember who you are.” His father took the blade – that blade that had once been his pride and joy – and thrust it back into his eldest son’s hands. Brullim Rowley’s hands were granite-cold, but firm. Tangible.

“Are you here or not?”

 “Have you forgotten all your schooling, boy? Have you forgotten what day this is? What hour?”

“No, I -” And yet Maxon did feel like a child again. He rubbed a hand over the beard upon his chin, and then straightened his shoulders. “I know they say Aridshire ancestors can appear on the Morti Morturi to aid us in our need,” he said softly. “I know that is the truth of our people and yet, I have never known it actually happen before. Not to any.”

“You must be special then, lad,” sneered the older man. He lifted his face to the skies again and breathed deeply. “It is so good to feel the air again. I never thought I would walk upon the lands of men once more. Not that we are currently in the lands of men, of course, damned fire-beasts, but a good sight closer than I ever thought I’d see. I will content my soul with it.”

“Why are you here?”

“Ah, yes, to business. The urach have fallen.”

Maxon blinked. This was not what he had expected.

“The Wasteland Woods have fallen?”

“No, the hags themselves. Their so-called Uncrowned Queen has sacrificed the last of their magics. They will not be able to cast their little enchantments again. They have fallen.”

“Why would she do such a thing?” he wondered aloud, stunned at the enormity of such a thing. It must be a trick.

Brullim shrugged. “The afterlife shows you many things, son, but it cannot show you into the hearts and minds of men.”

The urach were not men, and Maxon doubted they had hearts either, but he did not say so aloud.

“What does that mean for us?”

“For one thing, it means that I can stand here before you and talk to you once more. The urachs' old magics have been dominating the natural magics of the lands for decades. Now that they have fallen, other, lesser magics are reasserting themselves not just in Aridshire, but across the counties. The Storm-bringers rise on the Western edge, the Fae walk the forests of Bridgenford, the demons once again prowl the Starfire mines and the fire-beasts…”

“The fire-beasts will break their body binds!” Maxon realised. He swore vehemently. The battle would have been hard enough when the fire-beasts wore mortal skins, for they grew taller, broader and stronger than men did. It would be all but impossible when they were clothed in scales and horns, with fire blown past fang-filled mouths.

“Not if you act quickly,” his father said. “It takes a great deal of power to change shape, and it will take even more to break the binds placed upon them. They must imbibe a lot of mortal flesh before they are able to change. If you strike now – now, this very hour – you can still have the victory.”

“We cannot kill every dragon and those that are left will come after us when they can.”

“Not if you have something they want.”

“What can I have that they want?” Maxon asked in frustrated despair, kicking out at the boulder his father still sat upon.

His father just pointed a finger along the crevice in response, and then disappeared from sight as if he was never there.

Maxon growled under his breath. Could he not just give a simple answer? Would it have been so hard? But Brullim had been an inscrutable man in life. Death had not mellowed him.

Maxon crept along the crevice nonetheless, his sword high in his hand, his body low to the shadows.

There was a cave at the end of the winding pathway, black as a gaping throat and, as he peeked within it, he saw half a dozen men, body-bound dragons for sure this time, encircling... he backed away hurriedly as a head whipped towards him and fled back down the crevice to the waiting Burne.

“We need to move now,” he said without introduction as he arrived. “Move your men into position. I want twelve regiments to storm the caves without mercy and I want three regiments with me.”

Three regiments was overkill, mayhap, it was a thin and narrow crevice they would have to creep through after all, but those six dragons were sure to be the fiercest and most blood-thirsty of all, even in their body-bound form. He could take no chances with this. If he was lucky, they could finish this war once and for all.

He held them into position tightly, but a roar within told him the dragons had sensed their presence long before they arrived. Two dragons came surging out, bearing a sword in each hand. They were tall and hard, clad in armour with very little gaps between it to thrust their weapons home, and half a dozen of Rowley’s men fell before they knew what had happened. Maxon himself only managed to parry a thrust aimed at his head by sheer luck. He managed to edge his way behind one of them as the guard lunged forwards to decapitate one of Rowley’s soldiers, and Maxon grabbed hard onto the helm and yanked it off of his head, ducking low as the dragon whirled around at the movement. His helmet clattered to the floor and, distracted by Maxon, his head soon followed.

One down. Five to go.

He left the troops to pile onto the guard still standing, and led half his regiment forwards through the cave entrance. The remaining four dragons were standing armed and ready around the smoldering nest dominating the cave, a rudimentary pile of glowing coals piled into a circle, a woman writhing and grunting upon the top of it, trying to hold her screams in.

Rowley never liked enclosed fighting much at the best of times. There was never enough room to swing properly, and you were more likely to hit your ally than your enemy in close quarters, but they did not have much choice now.

It was chaos. The small cave was echoing with screams and grunts of the dying, men falling over each other, falling over corpses, shattered shields, bloodied, swearing, dying in the dripping hot darkness. But the armies of men outnumbered the four elite guards and numbers prove the day most times. If you can not give me luck, give me numbers, as his father used to say. 

The nest in the centre of the cave was still glowing hot with the coals by the time the last dragon had fallen blank-eyed to the floor. The woman upon it was undoubtedly the dragon queen, despite the simple white shift she wore. She was sweating, unusual in a fire-beast, and was panting and writhing upon the fires.

“What is she doing?” asked Millerson, Rowleys serjent-at-arms. 

“Birthing a child,” Maxon murmured. Millerson, a confirmed bachelor, reared away in panic, but Maxon did not move. “These must be the birthing caves. They’d not send her down here so little guarded if they did not have to.”

“I thought dragons could not have children anymore?” 

Maxon shrugged.

“They’re rare, certain-sure. Dragons are not very fertile, it seems. Now hold your tongue, Millerson. You are scaring the labouring mother, and you are making the whole thing much longer than it need be. Go and wait outside.”

Millerson gladly obeyed, and he was not the only one. Soon Maxon and the dragon queen were the only living creatures left within the birthing caves, dripping with condensation and sweat.

“You are doing well,” he told her, perching himself upon the edge of the smoking nest but not touching her. “It will be done soon.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” The woman was trying desperately to hold the child within her, as if she could keep it safe within her womb, but it was already halfway crowned and there was no stopping it now. “Please, it’s just a baby. You can not have it. You can not take it. Please.”

“And I will take care of it as if it were my own,” Rowley promised her. “I do not want to kill it. I want to use its life to buy a lasting peace between us.”

“We have peace. Wyvon made an accord with your king!”

Rowley snorted. The accords were little more than surrender, giving too much power into the hands of the fire-beasts which had oppressed them for so long, not seizing the waxing vulnerability the dragons were facing at last. Ferris has negotiated to pay the dragons mortal men as a treaty, for goodness sake. Condemned criminals, true, but it started with murderers and rapists, and then turned to petty thieves and vagabonds and finally ended with ‘treasonous talk’, from anyone who could be heard disagreeing with the king’s opinions. Politics was a shale mountain, slippery and uneven. You started down a poor path and you could not stop falling until you had reached the crevice below. He’d not be ratifying any treaty that sold mortal men into the dragon’s dinner table, no matter what they’d done.

“A real peace,” he said. “One both our peoples can rely upon. I want my people to work the lands and raise their children knowing they need not fear dragon fire rousing the sunset skies. Is that so much to ask?”

The woman screamed as another labour pang came upon her, sweat prickling on her brow, beneath those distinctive fire-eyes; orange, red, yellow and blue all swirled together hypnotically. She clutched her bleeding fingers at the child’s growing head as if she could push him back within and they would both end up dead in that case. Rowley clutched at her hands firmly. They were hot beneath his hands, turning his own skin pink as if he had plunged it beneath scalding water. He trapped them gently in his own.

“I am going to take him one way or another,” he said quietly. “Work with me, not against me, and I will let you say goodbye properly, I give you my honour on it.”

The mother screamed again, and he pushed one hand against her cheek. Her eyes, clouded with pain, sought his at last.

“I swear no harm will come to your child if I can help it,” he promised. “I do not intend to kill your child. I want it as a hostage, nothing more. I will raise your spawn amongst my own, as if it was a mortal babe, and – unless your kind rise in fire and rebellion and scorch the earths of the mortal lands, killing thousands of our own children with little regard and even less mercy once more – I will not harm a single hair of its head. I swear it upon the graves of my ancestors. I swear it upon my own life.”

“Give me blood on it,” she croaked.

Rowley held his hand out flat to her, and she scraped her nails down his palm. By all the ancestors, they were sharper than any blade he had. Blood welted out immediately and she held it to her lips and drank deep, then she sank back into her smouldering nest and let out a shuddering breath, releasing the child within her at last. It burst forth with a gush of blood and water.

Maxon went to pick it up, severing the cord which bound it to its mother with his knife. He wrapped it in his own cloak, the mucus smearing the expensive fabric a bright and bloody red, and he handed it into its exhausted mother’s arms.

“It’s a boy,” he said.

She blinked in exhaustion.

“Call him Bara,” she said, and she pressed a kiss to his forehead. “He is the last hope for us all.”

Maxon let her cradle him for a moment more, singing soft, crooning lullabies to her precious bundle beneath her breath, and then he put a hand on her shoulder.

“I must take him now,” he said gently. “It is the only way to stop the war. It will save the lives of your people and mine.”

She pressed another kiss to the tiny head and muttered something low into the tiny babe’s ears and then surrendered him into the enemy’s hands with a low and keening wail.

“What will he eat?” Maxon asked over the echoing grief.

“The same as any mortal, whilst he is body-bound,” she sniffed. “Find him a wet-nurse as fast as you can. One that can stand the heat.”

“I will send someone back to find you,” he said, bundling the small child up tightly in his cloak and holding him to his chest. The queen just laughed mirthlessly, tears rolling unchecked down her face, steaming slightly on her hot skin. She slumped back upon the coals she nested amongst.

“Do not bother,” she said. “The ripples brought my labour early. I was not prepared for it. My time is fading. Let me go out peacefully to sleep.”    

“As you wish, your majesty,” he said, bowing his head. She deserved at least that little courtesy for the sacrifice she had given, though he knew his men would scorn him for calling her such titles.

“Remember your promise, mortal,” she said. “Unless my kind breaks the peace first, you must protect my son as your own.”

He did no’t reply. He just clutched the babe closer to his body, the warmth of the tiny thing seeping even through the fabrics. He was starkly reminded of the day Féon had bore him his own boy, how small he had felt, cradling the tiny little limbs, scrunched up and wobbling – how impossible it was to protect this hiccoughing little smudge from the world around them. He wondered if his own father had felt the same way when he was born. Mayhap he would ask him, if his father’s spirit deigned to visit him again on the next holy day.

The war was raging around them in the blackness and the night as they left the crevice. The dragons had the advantage, no doubt about that, even though it was an ambush. Dragons were stronger and had better senses, and they were on their home turf. Still, there was no fire flying yet, so the dragons were still body-bound. That had to be something. And the mortals outnumbered them ten to one. Many would die tonight but hopefully enough of the dragons would fall to make the sacrifice worth it.

He called his men into tighter regiment around him, the ones that had survived the onslaught of the six at the birthing nest. He hoped those six were the best the dragons had to offer, surely they must be if they were guarding the precious dragon prince. If all of the fighters were as strong as those six, there would be no one left of the troops he had sent above. As it was, he was sure it had been a m******e. He had taken three full regiments down that tunnel to their death. He was only walking out with only one and a scrap.

They pulled in close to him, as he bid them. And they crawled upwards slowly and surely, slipping on the bloodstained stones, the corpses of their loved ones and enemies, the churned earth. He almost dropped the little prince thrice.

Bara.

He assumed it meant something noble and dignified in the dragon tongue. In the language of Aridshire county it was a type of cob loaf. There was something fitting about that, mayhap: he’d certainly be closer to a commoner than a prince in Grimkeep castle.

The King’s Cave was easy to spot, even in the cloud-covered night. It was large and ornately carved, gilded across the entrance rocks with a steep slope to it. It was also the cave with the most bodies strewn amongst it. He presumed the King had pulled his soldiers in tight when they realised they were under attack, drawing them all into one defensible position. He plunged into the darkness boldly, still clutching the child, calling for the guards to flare the lanterns so that they could see where they were going.

The air was cold down here, despite the lava streams which incessantly bubbled and broiled down in the dark. It stank of stale air, blood and marrow. Rotten.

“Well?” he called as he approached the front lines. The fighting seemed to have stopped, and he was pleased to see a goodly number of men still standing.

“We chased them down into their fortress, but they holed up together behind those walls, and they’re not coming out,” said Burne. He was splattered with gore and his arm had a chunk out of it, bleeding freely, but he was not otherwise hurt.

“Numbers?”

“We’ve got six and a half regiments still standing by my approximate count and we have counted at least two score of dragon bodies amongst the slain. I do not know how many of them are in there though. It does not matter. Even dragons need to eat. We can wait them out.”

No, we cannot. The fall of the urach has seen to that. If we wait too long, the dragons can shift into their reptilian form, and no mortal man will be left standing after that. 

Rowley just barged past Burne and approached the walls. They were closely carved and very high, he saw, stretching from the ceiling to the floor impassably. The stalactites and stalagmites before them looked like teeth or bars. The doors were small, little more than  mortal sized, and would not be any good for letting a full-bodied fire-beast through, but then a fire-beast could probably knock down those stones as simply as a child tumbled wooden blocks. He’d heard tell of it before, though he had never yet seen it with his own eyes. As with so much, it was hard to tell what was truth and what was myth with the fire-beasts. He looked at the little port-holes in the midst of the stones. No doubt a dozen guards were watching them warily, trying to make them keep their distance.

“Send me the king of the dragons,” he hollered. His voice echoed in the dripping cave eerily. “I wish to parlay with him. Tell him I have his son, Bara, the last hope of the firebeasts.” And, as his words echoed eerily back through the dripping caves, he hoped beyond all hope that this would work.