Haven Divided (The Dragon's Brood Cycle Book 2) Read online

“You’re lying,” Paige said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

  The man looked back over his shoulder at her as he drew the bolts on the door. A look of surprise crossed his gnarled features—perhaps the first genuine expression she’d seen there.

  “You know I’m not,” he said quietly, and then he turned, pulled open the door, and limped out into the wind and darkness.

  Paige stood in the doorway, watching him climb the narrow lane that led up from the small valley where the safe house was nestled. The dark figure moved slowly and steadily, little more than a shadow amidst shadows, shoulders hunched against the wind. Faintly, Paige was aware of the scent of woodsmoke in the air and the rumble of thunder in the distance.

  The man reached the top of the hill where the lane gave way to a paved thoroughfare. She could just make out his coat as it billowed around his slender frame.

  She was about to turn away and close the door when she saw him pause. He seemed to be fumbling with something in his coat for a moment, and then a light blazed in the darkness. He raised it before him, letting the reddish glow illuminate the road at his feet.

  There was another moment when he seemed to be staring back over his shoulder at her, but of course, there was no way she could really know that in the dark. It was just her imagination.

  The seconds slipped away, and then the light and the man moved on, vanishing into the night.

  It wasn’t until the stranger was gone and she was bolting the door against the chill wind that Paige realized she’d never asked the man how he’d known where to find her.

  Charging

  Sam Tawny’s eyes snapped open before his mind had even realized that he was awake. Faint moonlight, as dingy as the glass of the window through which it fell, shone across the room, allowing him to see only the vague outlines of objects—the hulking shadow of the wardrobe, the delicate lines of his wife’s vanity, and the steep, rounded curve of his own belly as it rose and fell beneath the sheet. Beside him, his wife, Laura, snored on, the clockwork rumble of her respiration putting him in mind of the roar and hiss of a summer storm.

  What the devil had woken him? If he could sleep through his wife’s constant noise, he should be able to sleep through pretty much anything.

  He listened hard, thinking of the dogs who’d gotten into the slop bins behind the shop last spring, but there was only silence. Well, apart from Laura, anyway.

  With a sigh, Sam shifted his bulk and closed his eyes. He needed to try to sleep. He had an ox to butcher in the morning for Lord Kyran’s feast tomorrow afternoon. If it was late, His Lordship was likely to have him served on the gleaming platters intended for the ox.

  Go back to sleep, he told himself.

  And he almost did.

  He was just beginning to slip languidly from the gray into the black, when a loud metallic clang from outside brought him all the way back up from the depths once more.

  So it was the dogs, then, damn it all.

  He quietly heaved his considerable bulk out of bed, but his attempts at stealth were wasted. The mattress shifted as it became suddenly free of his weight, and Laura’s snores abruptly ceased.

  “What is it, Sam?” she murmured sleepily as he rammed his feet into the boots he’d left by the footboard.

  “Just dogs, Laura,” he told her, “out in the bin again. Go back to sleep. Be back in a minute. I’ll have to chase them off.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he stomped down the stairs and into the cold mustiness of his shop. Before he’d even reached the bottom, he’d heard Laura’s snores resume.

  “Must be nice,” he grumbled under his breath as he turned toward the back.

  The familiar smells of steel, blood, and roasting meats filled him, as they always did, with a warm sense of nostalgia. He’d grown up here, in this very shop. His father had been a butcher, and his father’s father before him. Now it was Sam’s, and he’d be damned if he was going to let a bunch of mangy strays make a mess for him to clean up in the morning.

  He stomped over to the back door, debated, then pulled his cloak from the hook beside it and threw it around his shoulders. Summer was coming to an end, and the wind outside was chill. He couldn’t risk catching cold or worse, this close to Samhain and the harvest. There’d be more work than he could keep up with soon, and he couldn’t afford to turn any of it away.

  He drew the bolt, then paused again, eyeing Laura’s cane beside the door. He took it, hefted it, and let it rest against his round, meaty shoulder. Better safe than sorry. That’s what his old man had always told him, and it was a motto Sam had lived by all his life. It had kept his belly full, his fire stoked, and his woman by his side for nearly thirty years.

  He pulled the door open, and a gust of bitter wind forced him back a step. The early autumn winds were worse than he’d expected—worse than they’d been this early for as long as he could remember, in fact.

  Grimacing, he bowed his head and stumbled out into the alley behind the shop, pulling the door closed behind him. Grit stung his eyes for a moment, and he paused, rubbing it away before turning to his left.

  Slowly, he made his way along the alley toward the vague shapes of the slop bins at the far end. The wind roared in his ears, and leaves and bits of rubbish swirled around his feet, adding their brittle, scraping caw to the din. He heard nothing else; all was as it should be in the dim moonlight.

  As he passed the bins and rounded the corner of the shop, he saw two things simultaneously. The first was that the old fire bucket that had hung on the wall, unneeded and unused since his grandfather had been a boy, was gone.

  The second thing was the dark shape, tall and lithe, running toward the street.

  It was just a bucket, an old and rusting one at that, and yet anger roiled up inside him at the violation. It had hung there for over eighty years, and now some hoodlum was running off with it! Bastard!

  “Thief!” he cried, and he started to run after the dark shadow in the night. He’d forgotten he was old; he’d forgotten he was stones heavier than he ought to be. He ran, brandishing his wife’s cane and shouting obscenities.

  The figure did not slow or look back, and it didn’t seem to hear Sam’s shouts at all. It reached the front of the shop and turned down the dark street, its movements unnaturally graceful.

  Sam ran faster, his boots slapping the stones with loud, thunderous claps.

  “Stop! You…bastard!” he gasped. His heart thudded in his chest, suddenly racing with the rush of adrenaline.

  By the time he reached the street, he’d stopped shouting. It took all his breath just to keep his body in motion.

  Far ahead—too far ahead—he could just see his quarry reach the corner before disappearing into the shadows. Goddammit! How the devil was he moving so fast?

  Wheezing, Sam ran on. That bucket was heavy, full as it was with fifty pounds of sand. Surely, the thief couldn’t keep up that kind of pace carrying such a weight.

  He paused at the corner, clutching a stitch in his side and unsure which way his quarry had gone.

  To his right, the broad cobblestone street burrowed deeper into the city. He saw no sign of movement amidst the pools of darkness between the buildings; only a few lights shown from the windows of taverns that served their customers until dawn. He heard music from somewhere—a piano accompanied by harsh, drunken singing, loud and off-key—but nothing out of the ordinary.

  He looked left, in the direction of Seven Skies, and there he was, the thief, his cloak billowing out behind him as he hurtled toward the dark stone towers that reached into the star-strewn sky.

  “Thief!” he shouted again, and then he ran on.

  He stumbled over uneven places in the pavement, windmilling his arms wildly but keeping his feet moving. He couldn’t understand why no one had come in response to his shouts. Never a guard when you needed one, but always twenty on hand if you sneezed the wrong way—that was one of his old man’s little chunks of wisdom, too. But surely, someone must have heard hi
m.

  Suddenly, the street ahead was illuminated by a flickering blue light that gave all it fell on a strange purple sheen. The light danced and flickered before Sam’s eyes, moving faster than he could track.

  Warily, he slowed, squinting against the sudden brilliance.

  The man—surely it was a man—had stopped beside one of the high stone walls of Seven Skies. He seemed to be almost dancing some kind of crazy jig, leaping high into the air and flitting back and forth. The blue light moved with him, as if it shone out from the palm of one hand and onto the stone wall.

  Sam was only a dozen yards away when he finally appreciated the unnatural speed and agility with which the man moved. His leaps grew higher and higher, until Sam thought he would simply fly right over the spikes that topped the wall and into the courtyard beyond.

  From inside the fortress, there were shouts, and a bell began tolling vigorously. Finally, someone realized that something was happening. About fucking time!

  Feeling braver, Sam started forward again, unmindful of the stitch in his side, the painful hammering against his ribs, or the harsh, ragged rasps of his labored breathing.

  Imagine! What if it were him, Sam, who brought down this troublemaker and turned him over to the mistress’s men? Surely there’d be some kind of reward for that, wouldn’t there? And suppose—just suppose—the man turned out to be one of them Dragon’s Brood fellows. There was no telling what sort of gratitude the mistress might show him for such a brave and noble deed as that. Maybe he’d be able to take fewer jobs this Samhain; take Laura for some time away. They could visit her family in Coalhaven, or maybe even his niece in River’s Crossing.

  With his head full of possibilities, Sam put on one last burst of speed and came forward, raising Laura’s cane in both hands and readying himself to hit the man over the head with it at the first opportunity.

  The thief, still unaware or unmindful of Sam’s approach, leapt again, and Sam’s gaze followed his progress high into the air. He saw the figure convulse, and then a flash of dull steel as the fire bucket went flying. Sand, which had rested easily within the confines of the old bucket for nearly a century, ran down the stones of the wall, illuminated momentarily by another brilliant flash of that strange blue fire.

  The bucket hit the cobblestones with the low booming toll of a bell and rolled noisily away into the dark.

  Sam watched, transfixed, as the man seemed to float, almost weightlessly, back to earth, his cloak billowing out around him.

  There was a great metallic clang as the man’s feet made contact with the ground once again, and then he whirled to face Sam.

  Terror such as Sam had never known ran through his body in a sickening wave. His heart, playing a thunderous drumroll only a moment before, suddenly stopped for the space of a second, leaving the big man breathless before resuming an unsteady rhythm.

  There was nothing recognizable as human in the face that stared back at him from beneath a helmet of shining steel and glass. Crimson eyes blazed like the red coals of hell; mottled gray skin gave way seamlessly to cold, smooth steel that moved and rippled, as malleable as muscle and sinew.

  The thing’s lips parted, and a strange, flat voice emerged from its throat, utterly devoid of anything human.

  “Should’ve stayed home, old man,” it said, and then blue flame erupted from everywhere, filling Sam’s world with fiery brilliance.

  Laura’s cane clattered to the ground as Sam reached for his face, already screaming before he’d even truly felt the pain. His eyes were burning…burning… It felt as though his whole head was ablaze. The pain bit deep—deeper than the chill of the winds that blew around him.

  He heard, more than felt, when his eyeballs popped like overdone chestnuts. He could smell his own flesh cooking, filling his nose with the rich, meaty aroma of bacon that he knew so well. Gods, he could hear his skin sizzling…sizzling!

  He fell to his knees, screaming and blind. Dimly, he heard the clang of metal on stone, a harsh accompaniment to the thing’s flat, toneless laughter.

  As guards poured out of Seven Skies to surround Sam’s trembling and soundless form, the sun rose over the mountains far to the east. Its rays shone down on the city that surrounded Seven Skies; they warmed the faces of the drunks who had spent a long cold night huddled against cold stone walls; they gilded the windows of manor houses and shops; they stroked the matted fur of sleeping stray cats and dogs.

  Finally, they reached out and touched the wall that loomed over the place where Sam Tawny lay.

  There was but one man who did not have his attention focused on the city’s best butcher; one man who had already issued his orders and was now staring up at the fortress that he, for so many years, had called home. He watched, in silent fascination, one hand running absently through the graying hair above a lump of scarred and twisted cartilage that had once, many years before, been his right ear.

  Etched into the wall, nearly fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet high, was the intricate image of a dragon. Its outline was cut deep into the stones, which were blackened as if they’d been burned away, though he could not even begin to fathom the intense heat required to do such a thing.

  The dragon’s wings were spread in flight, and flames were wrought with elaborate detail, issuing from the beast’s enormous tooth-lined jaws.

  The sunlight reflected and refracted across the dragon’s scaly hide, shimmering in a thousand different colors. Fragments of rainbows danced, shifting and swirling as the light crept slowly higher up the wall. The illusion was one of constant motion, as if the great beast was about to turn its monstrous head toward the crowd below and incinerate the bystanders with one mighty breath.

  The man frowned, squinting his one good eye against the glare, and stepped forward.

  Cautiously, he reached out and touched the dragon’s long leg with the tip of one finger.

  The wall was still hot, but not enough to burn. The dragon’s scales were as smooth as the finest satin sheets.

  “Glass,” he muttered to himself. The whole damned image was made of glass.

  He stared for another moment, then turned back to his men and the shaking, smoking wretch that, until just a few short minutes before, had been the butcher.

  It was going to be a very, very long day.

  Was it just his imagination, or had he heard a voice shout, far off in the distance, as he’d turned?

  “For the dragon!”

  Slashing

  The boy didn’t know if he’d been born with a name. If he had, he certainly had never learned what it was. At the moment, he was calling himself Tom, and that was plenty good enough for him. It was a good name—a strong name. It made him think of rosy-cheeked, jolly young men picking apples in an orchard, although he couldn’t have explained why. It just did, and Tom had never been much of a one for asking the why of anything.

  In a month or two, if he thought of a better name, he’d change it. He was always changing names. It was good to keep becoming someone else anyway, because sometimes, people remembered your name, even when they’d forgotten everything else. He’d helped one man load bales of hay three times and given him a different name every time. The man, who was old and kindly, had never even looked at him twice. People didn’t pay attention to him, and mostly, he liked it that way.

  Tom sat on the roof of a barn, munching an apple he’d nicked, just like one of those rosy-cheeked Toms, as he stared at the shadowy mountain peaks to the west as the sun rose behind him. He thought, not for the first time, that they looked like the great teeth of some horrible monster, maybe even a dragon. Of course, he’d never have said such a thing aloud. Saying such a thing would get him remembered and likely hanged in the town square for all to see in the bargain. No, such thoughts were definitely best kept to oneself.

  But still, he was free inside his own head, wasn’t he? And he could imagine; he could even imagine dragons if he wanted to. He was good at imagining. Sometimes, on winter nights, as he lay shivering in
the dark, he’d imagine a great warm fire in a huge stone hearth, and sometimes that worked just well enough for him to fall asleep.

  A few days ago, although he’d lost count of just how many somewhere along the line, there’d been a whole lot of smoke billowing up from those mountains. People had started getting worried. He’d heard whispered talk like “devils comin’ too close” and “we’ve kept to ourselves all these years, they’d best do the same.”

  Tom didn’t know if anyone believed the old stories; he wasn’t sure if he did himself. Sometimes he did, but most times, he thought they were a whole lot of rubbish.

  Still, something had to have made all that smoke. Maybe one of those mountains was a volcano! Now that would be grand! What if one of them was a great big volcano and it erupted and sent lava pouring down on them and petrified the whole town, like in those pictures in that old book! That would really be something!

  Idly, he wondered what it would feel like to be petrified. All hot at first, he supposed, and then all cold.

  He tossed his apple core over his shoulder and began wiping his hands on his torn and grubby jeans. There was a metallic thud as it hit the little dish that whirred and spun on the roof of the barn, its lone finger pointed up into the sky.

  It was time for him to go before the family who owned this barn came out and found him perched on the roof. It’d been a safe enough place to spend the night away from stray dogs and other critters that would be attracted by the food in his pockets, but now that morning had come, it was time to seek other quarters.

  He crawled to the edge of the roof, caught hold of the pipe that was intended to carry runoff when it rained down to the ground, and slid down it himself.

  He landed silently on his bare feet and stretched, his small, lithe body possessed of an unconscious grace that was the sole providence of feline creatures and small children. He was small for his age, his clothes little more than tatters, and his hair was long, red, and caked with mud. He washed it sometimes in the river, but that was mostly because he liked the color of it. That was something else, though, that was best kept to himself. More often, it was better to let his hair stay dirty. There were fewer dark looks that way.