To Lure a Dragon
Chapter 14
How I wish I'd chosen darkness from cold.
How I wish I had screamed out loud, . . .
How I wish I could walk through the doors of my mind;
Hold memory close at hand,
Tears and Rain - James Blunt
Alys became aware of a golden light shining in her eyes; her body was no longer cold and she could feel an unknown weight on her, pushing against her lungs in a comforting suffocation. I'm dead, she thought, and this is God calling me to heaven. Then the light abruptly halted and her mind drifted up and down on an undulating wave of consciousness until she was so deep within her mind that even the light couldn't pull her out. There, she saw wondrous things. Her long-dead mother holding out a welcoming hand with a long-forgotten gentle smile, beckoned her closer. Alys drifted, seemingly floating towards her.
"Alys, my baby," she cooed, enveloping the girl in a hug of true warmth, shocking her freezing shell to life. Alys hadn't known cold until she knew heat. "You have come back to me."
"Am I dead," Alys asked, but the word was foreign here, in this place of memory, and she almost didn't understand the question herself.
"Soon," mom promised, the word stretching on and whisper-hissing in Alys's ear. The hug became fiery, and she recoiled, alarmed and frightened. Where she expected the burning image of the woman who gave her life, or maybe fairy trickery, was nothing but open air which looked white, but was not, black, but was not. It was nothing, and it was everything.
Alys started to weep. She was alone and dying, and everything just seemed so overwhelming in that moment. It had been a long while since her last good cry, since Selendrile left her to fend for herself in a frightening world of good people and evil. This town had shown her human nature as it probably shouldn't be seen, as the blinders of familiarity were not skewing her vision. When you know no one, it is easier to learn everything. She had been lonely for a long time, but this abandonment she was feeling was sharp, the searching edge of her conscious trying to find someone familiar, someone there. She would even wish for this burning wraith of her mother to return and engulf her in flaming sensation.
Ellis? Ellis? I FOUND HIM.
Alys spun around, the loud voice and words so terribly familiar, and for a moment she thought she could grab them into her small fists as use them as a rope to the surface. She was drowning again, in this hollow air of nothingness. Every breath hurt, but she couldn't feel herself breathing. Her vision swam, and yet there was nothing she could see. She felt like a range of contradictions were pulling at her limbs, caressing her skin and tugging her hair until everything burned like cold cold ice. Thoughts of death were never far.
"You'll live," and amused voice promised by her side. Alys turned on foot, coming face to the flaming red hair of her friend Risa.
"Are you sure?" Alys asked, eying her doubtfully, "because you sure didn't."
"Everyone's a critic." Risa sat, crossing her legs under her and looked up expectantly. Downwards was the same as up, and Alys didn't know if there was actually a ground or if this was something her limited knowledge of philosophy wouldn't be able to comprehend. 'I am here. I am standing. Therefore, the nothingness must have something' or some other type of pre-Socratic 'all is fire' metaphysical… information. Alys sat, determined not to make her head hurt more than it already was and turned towards her best friend, who was looking alive and well, a drastic difference from the pallid sweaty skin, rigid muscles, and locked jaw of someone dying from tetnus. She also aged along with Alys, so she was now a sixteen year old girl instead of the eight she had died at, and the first thing that Alys noticed was that she would have grown up to be the town beauty, and would likely have been married off already.
"You look good," Alys noted.
"Thank you," Risa giggled, bringing Alys back to a time of the sheltered innocence of children running through fields with growing grass and whispering in excited tones about the strange visitor walking through the town. She cocked her head to the side. "They've found you, and are trying to warm you up. Your lips are blue and they thought you dead, but they noticed a small puff of air emerging from your lips."
"I was worried." Worried was an understatement. Alys had been petrified that she was dead and this was all there was on the other side.
"I was too. It's too soon for you to join me." Risa leaned forward, conspiring with Alys like a best friend would. "Tell me about this bull."
"What bull?" Alys asked, mind going through all the barn animals she had seen in the past while.
"You know," Rise said with a grin, her countenance suddenly changing to someone more serious as her voice became deeper. "You're a pig and I'm a bull, and never shall the two of us fornicate in sin."
"He said horse."
"He looked like a bull from where I was standing," Risa pointed out with a teasing, naughty grin.
"Risa!" Alys exclaimed, blushing at her friend's obvious meaning. If Risa had lived, she would have experienced more of this adult humour, but Risa had died and so it was foreign sounding coming out of a mouth she still thought of as eight years of age. "I wouldn't know. I never looked."
"Oh, you looked."
"I did not!" Alys argued, knowing she had lost the dispute already. She always did have difficulty lying to her best friend.
"Then how do I know what he looks like naked. All golden and…"
"Stop it!" Alys winced away, putting her hands over her ears. "I can't hear you. Laaaalalaaaa."
"You always were tone-deaf." Risa said as a parting shot as she suddenly just wasn't there.
"Risa?" Alys called, knowing that like her mother, the warmth of another presence would not return when she begged it to.
"Princess Alys," he said, bowing with a straight back and stiff arms. "I am forever in your servitude."
She grinned, looking at him from the grassy slope on the side of the road. Her head was above her feet even though she was lying down and she was using this natural support as a way to see the clouds without straining her neck. "Are you my knight or my page boy?" She asked haughtily, the ethereal moonlight muted behind his golden hair gave him the appearance of Galahad, roguishly awaiting a favour from a lady before going into battle.
Selendrile narrowed his brow at her for a moment, thrown not only by her insult but the sudden character she adopted. He had meant his original statement as an irony to her worn, stolen clothing and the relaxed slouch of her body. Now, her facial expression became arrogant and her body language seemed more languid than peasant. He was charmed. "I am the knight who can tame dragons. The slayer of many such armed men before me. And you, my dear, shall be my latest conquest."
"Hardly," Alys replied with a quirked eyebrow as she went back to watching the clouds form over the glimmering stars. She pointed to a cluster of sparking lights in the sky. "Is that the Draco constellation you were telling me about?"
Instead of answering her question, he grabbed her wrist and hauled her off the ground in one swift motion. Suddenly, she was ensconced in his arms, his breath warm against her skin. "You will not ignore me," he promised, fingers gripping into her hip through the layers of clothing.
Then nothing.
"Selendrile," Alys called out, knowing she wouldn't be answered. She wanted to say that the scene in her memory hadn't happened, but she had forgotten about it in the time long before caves and horses and pigs.
"Sorry to disappoint." An equally loved male voice said.
"Father!" Alys gasped, spinning on heel so she could face him. Like the other two visitors before him, he was living and breathing instead of dead, as if she were being haunted by the people in her past who loved her.
"Why aren't you married yet, child?"
"Marriage?" Alys asked with a laugh. "You were the one who encouraged me to wait."
"You'll be waiting forever, if you keep on your chosen path."
"But it's the path I've picked, isn't it?" Alys asked, wondering what path her father was referring to. Was he talking about Selendrile? This was all very strange.
"You should have died with me," her father told her calmly. "You won't last the night."
"I've lasted worse nights than this," Alys promised, yelling after the faded image of the man who was nothing like the father of reality. These manifestations of her parents were cruel, telling her harsh realities she didn't want to hear and had buried in her subconscious. It was not them saying it, but her inner most self - the part of her who felt guilty for her mother's death far ago and the more recent demise of her father. It was her fault, she knew, that they were no longer in this world.
"Life goes on," he promised. "Without you, they wouldn't have survived more than relatively a few years on this earth. I've seen humans born, and I've seen them die after a long life, all shriveled and in pain from living. I don't see the appeal."
"You aren't dead," Alys said suspiciously. "Right?"
Selendrile snorted. "Of course not. You saved me, remember?"
"Are you here to save me?" Alys asked, wondering why he was here physically instead of another memory. This hadn't happened. This conversation was current and new.
Selendrile picked at pieces of former meals wedged under his finger-talons. "I've done that already." He replied with disinterest. This was the cruel Selendrile she had encountered last. The heartless dragon who could leave a young girl to fend for herself.
"Then why are you here?" Alys asked, angry now.
"I'm dead to you, so I'm added to your list of victims."
"You aren't dead to me!" Alys insisted. "I'm just furious with you."
"Dead," he mocked. "I will outlive you in reality, but in your mind I'm long gone." He disappeared in irony.
"That isn't true," Alys cried, her breath hitching with sobs. "You'll never be dead to me. I'll keep you with me always." She didn't know who she was talking about. Selendrile. Daddy. Risa. Mother. They were all the same, her four visitors. The only people in her life who meant anything to her. "Selendrile! You lizard turd! You're all I have left. The only one."
"You'll be fine," he promised, smiling at her. One of his hands caressed her cheek. Alys was taken back for a moment at his reappearance and change, but then realized they weren't in the nothingness room anymore. They were back on that grassy knoll beside the road, the grass no longer green and lush, but a muted, sickly brown of dead life.
"Are you sure?" She asked, leaning into his touch. He was warm and soft, holding her gently as if she were precious and fragile to him. "I'm so frightened," she told only him.
"I am too," he confided. "A human's body is frail, and yours has been through a lot. You need warmth, but most importantly you need to fight the fever."
"I am."
"You aren't," he informed her. "You're lost, princess."
"What should I do?" She asked him, because he was omniscient even outside her dreams.
"You'll know when the time comes." He paused for a second. He was so close she could see his long golden lashes flutter over his astonishing and sharp purple eyes, swirling with indigos, violets and concern.
"Can't you help me," she asked as a small, wounded child.
"I can't just snap my fingers and make everything all right." Selendrile's eyes closed as if he didn't know whether to say what was coming next. "I can give you eternal life."
"Can you?" She asked, surprised. This was a power she had never presumed he could give.
"In a way. I can bind you with me forever. When I die, you die. You'll be human with me during the night. This, I cannot offer to you now."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want to do that to you. Promise me you'll live, and I promise that I'll save you if you can't."
"I promise." Alys said, wondering if she would fight for her life if she knew the alternative was to be with Selendrile for an eternity.
"I'll let you die if you do that," he pledged, reading her mind. "I need your promise."
"Yes, I promise," Alys said, impatience creeping into her voice.
"Not through words," he said with a sudden smile. Slowly, his lips brushed over hers in an eternal vow. He was gone before the kiss could end, and the nothingness was suddenly black.
"Selendrile!" Alys screamed, searching but lost.
"Where is that damn boy," Jorge muttered crossly, following Alys's footprints through the snow, ignoring the trickles which tumbled into his already wet boots. He had come home expecting a warm meal and a bowl of hot water to immerse his feet into like he received every night from his wife, but tonight she was gone and a horrible screaming was coming from next door. He had bolted through the door of Conrad's house, thinking someone was slaughtering the womanfolk, only to find Lora half naked, legs spread, and the sickening sight of a baby crowning ruining his view.
"Gah!" He had exclaimed, embarrassed and trying to hide his readied sword behind his back before his wife mocked him with her sharp tongue.
"Get out!" His wife had screamed. "And find that lazy Ellis boy with the midwife while you're at it you big lug."
So Jorge had no choice but to go back out into the wind and snow, searching for one of his students instead of relaxing in front of the fire. The fact that his dog was barking frantically and so loudly that the neighbours would probably complain if they weren't currently listening to Lora's screams of pain did not make him much happier. The brief thought that he was glad he wasn't a woman did appease him for a moment, but then his dog howled and Jorge shook his head at the beast. "Shut up," he muttered, wondering why he owned a dog anyway.
The dog renewed it's effort, barking so harshly that Jorge abandoned his search for the wayward boy and went to go see what catch of the day his mutt was going to proudly claim. He emerged from the forest to see the dog hunched over his kill protectively, growing silent when he appeared. Whatever animal the dog had caught was about twice its size. "What do you have there, boy? A nice yummy supper?" Jorge asked, humouring the dog. It wasn't a stretch for him, as he spent most of his life humouring his demanding wife. There were parallels there, but he wasn't about to implicitly state them.
The dog growled impatiently, if a dog can be impatient, and moved out of the way. Jorge recognized Ellis's sweater in the curled up body behind the dog and for one irrational moment he thought the animal had attacked him. Then, his warrior training kicked in and he noticed the broken ice and frost appearing over the body. "Well I'll be the bastard son of a leprechaun!" Jorge exclaimed, rushing over to Alys. "Ellis. Ellis. Are you alright? I FOUND HIM!" He yelled into the empty woods, remembering too late that this wasn't an official search party like the town had to form almost every spring for the body of someone who had gone missing during the winter.
Alys didn't move.
Jorge picked her up, not knowing whether she was still alive or not, but knowing that he needed to get her body inside and away from the perils of the forest. The sound of Alys's body ripping from the ice and snow was deafening, and Jorge hoped it had been only her clothes and not her skin frozen to the ground. As he jostled her, Alys coughed weakly. Jorge was so stunned that the person in his arms lived, he almost dropped her.
For Jorge, the trek through the forest was one of the longest he had ever taken, and yet he made better time than usual. The trip wasn't entirely uneventful, as he almost tripped once and another time he almost wacked the poor boy's head off against a tree. Once he reached his house, as he didn't think it was wise to upset the women in the birthing room next door, plus there was no way he was braving that again, so he set Ellis on the floor and began to strip him of his wet, frozen clothing. Before he had left to search for Ellis, he had put his own water for his poor, mishandled feet on the fire, and though he had felt guilty for it after finding the lad, he was congratulating himself for his foresight now that he needed it. Sparingly, he used the water to thaw the clothing encasing his favourite student.
"It's true you know," Jorge began conversationally. "You show great promise with steal." Inch by inch Jorge was able to peel the ice away from Ellis's skin. "When you grow up, you'll make a real man. If ya know what I mean." Jorge finished yanking the sweater off 'Ellis'.
"GAH!" He exclaimed, throwing the shirt back over her to cover a couple of things which definitely wouldn't make her a real man. If ya know what I mean. Jorge's eyes shifted left and right as he wondered what he should do now. It was more important for him to get Ellis-or-whatever-her-name-was into something drier than to obsess over that fact that he was a she, but he didn't know if he could go on undressing he-who-is-she in good consciousness. What he needed was his wife.
"Ruff," the dog barked.
Jorge agreed. "I'm sorry, girl." He said, going to work on taking off her pants. He was working with only one eye half open, as if that would protect her modesty. He finished with the frozen clothing, then quickly wiped her down with the scalding water in an attempt to warm her skin. "I guess that means you're doubly as good with those blades, being a woman and all."
Once she was redressed in some of the warmest clothing he could find, Jorge pulled the sleeping pallet in front of the fire and bundled her under the quilt. Her skin was already clammy with fever even though he had been careful to dry her. It made his heart ache to think he had been too late, and that while life was being given next door, it was probable it would be taken away here.
"Jorge," his wife yelled crossly from the doorway, wiping what looked like blood from her hands as she hurried into the room. "I had to birth that baby on my own. Did you even go looking for the lad? Ungrateful whelp, I bet he's out somewhere charming some lady out of her shirts."
"Honey," Jorge warned, trying to catch her attention. "I don't think she'll be doing anything."
"What are you talking about?" Helen asked sharply, going back to the bread she had been working on before being called away. Jorge didn't see her wash her hands and he knew that was some bread he was going to feed to the dog. The mutt deserved a reward anyway.
"The lad had fallen into the stream. I brought him back here and when I was trying to get the wet clothes off him I found out that he was a she."
"Connie's been harbouring a girl? He won't like that."
"He wouldn't like you calling him Connie either," Jorge retorted. "That's not the point. You're going on and on about the lad inconveniencing you, and in reality not only is it not a lad, but…"
"But what?" Helen asked, not used to overt criticism from her husband.
"She probably won't last the night."
The dog whined, curling up beside Alys's leg and putting his head on her stomach. Next door, a baby was learning to cry while Alys's breath grew labored.
©RelenaFanel.oct26.2006
Hey everyone. My birthday is November 1st and my presents from my family arrived today. It's making me excited. Also, NaNoWriMo is starting that day, so if any of you want a buddy, my username is RelenaFanel. I'll even reciprocate if you let me know your username (in a review?).
So here is your 14th chapter. I tried to have Alys's part a line of consciousness through the mind of someone with a high fever. I know it's stylistically different and may not make a lot of sense, but I'm sure most of your remember some conclusion you reached during a flu that you thought was brilliant (such as red socks must make your feet warmer than blue) and later realized it was stupid.
Finally, I made a new Vivian Vande Velde LJ community called Murking Fantasy. So if you have LJ, why not join. At the moment there is a challenge going on for Halloween and the entries are due Oct. 30th. If you don't want to participate, then maybe it'll be equally as fun to go check out the stories entered. I'm going to try to submit one Dragon's Bait fic and another CotN.
Reviews are much-loved!