Previously. . .
Olek had found the boy in Camelot; asleep in the hollow of an enormous oak tree just as dawn had started to lighten the sky. He was curled around the largest egg he had ever seen. It was blue as indigo ink from merchants across the sea. Olek knew as soon as he saw it. It could only have been a dragon egg, sir.
The last dragon egg known to men.
Chapter Two
He hung in the twilight between the world of waking and the world of sleep. He dreamt. With the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, he dreamt of things half-remembered and things forgotten. Then he dreamt of things that were- in the cold, vast world outside the protection of his shell. They were not things he knew before, though they were similar. When these dreams came, they hurt him with a cold, aching sorrow, though he knew not why. Not at first.
He saw a woman singing to herself, alone in a hut, her cheeks sunken from hunger. She rocked back and forth on the floor, while the fire burned low in the hearth, the wood almost gone. There was no pile beside it, waiting to be fed to the fire. Soon she would be left without heat; but the woman did not glance at the empty space where a pile of kindling should be. She seemed oblivious to anything but her own empty song.
He knew the woman. He knew the hut. But the dream felt wrong, wrong, wrong.
Her song was meant for him; meant to put him to sleep at night, to soothe the ache of hunger, to ward off the trembling cold on unforgiving winter nights. Suddenly he knew what was so wrong in the dream. He was not there when he should have been. She sang to no one when, in his memories, she ought to have been singing to him; celebrating the end of the long famine together. She was mourning for him!
Aching, he tried to reach out to her; to comfort her with the warmth of his fire but she was beyond his reach. The hearth had gone dark, the fire burned out, the ashes cold. He could do nothing for her even as he curled his tiny wings tighter around himself and heard his heart beat, and beat, and beat while the woman wept.
His mother.
A long, tense silence followed his words. Olek didn't dare breathe. He sneaked a glance from under his lashes at the frail looking flesh lord. He was reclining almost languidly on his fur-cushioned seat, his face unreadable. Alarm bells started to ring in Olek's head at the sight. When the flesh lord started acting like a cat basking in sun, limbs loose and lazy, eyes half-lidded, and expression slack with disinterest, terrible things always followed. It meant he was truly angry.
Olek could not blame him. A dragon egg was worth an army of trained slave brats. It was worth more than a king's ransom most likely. Lords and king's would be vying to outbid each other for it. Ector could have named any price he wanted for the last dragon egg in the British Isles, perhaps even in the known world. So Olek had expected this reaction the moment he let the egg go, but it didn't stop the fear from rising up in his throat, sour and bitter as bile.
"How did you lose the dragon egg, Olek?" The flesh lord asked almost gently, as though speaking to a crying child. The dark hairs on the back of Olek's neck and on his arms began to rise.
"It all began with the boy himself, sir. He- he seems to have some kind of special connection to the egg. Being near it made him. . ." Olek fumbled for the right word for a bit, finally settling with "unmanageable, sir."
Ector raised a brow at his lieutenant's choice of words. For Olek, his most capable, most dependable man to say that anything was unmanageable. . . He rolled the thought around in his mind and tried to imagine a scenario where the boy had Olek completely stumped. He failed.
"Explain in detail. From the beginning." This little boy is becoming more and more interesting.
The flesh lord was back to his usual sharp demeanor and Olek secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps he would survive this after all. Olek knew the lord would see that he had made the right decision to let the egg go as long as the lord gave him a chance to explain properly. After all, no one could anticipate the flesh lord's mind for business better than Olek. He had learned everything he knew at his master's knee, or his feet rather- he was more favored dog than favored son and he didn't mind at all.
And so with a lighter heart, he told the story from the beginning.
Two weeks ago. . .
Arthur woke sideways in mid-air, trapped in between muscled arms and a leather-clad waist. He kicked at air futilely and tried to shriek out his outrage at the treatment (how dare they lay hands on me!) but there was a filthy-tasting cloth stuffed in his mouth and he only mortified himself by sounding like a furious cat. The arms did not budge or loosen. He was being carried like- like a pile of dirty laundry!
He threw his gaze around wildly and tried to make sense of what was happening. He was in the forest. The smell of rotting things, pine, and dampness from half-melted snow was sharp in his nostrils. Crisp leaves and tiny twigs crunched with every heavy step the man took.
Peering over the man's shoulder, Arthur saw that they were walking away from a gigantic tree. The gnarled roots rose and twisted out of the ground all around its base, as tall as the boy himself and nearly as thick as his torso. The tree had a hollow in the middle of it's trunk. The entrance was large and yawned like the dark mouth of a cave. Another man, tall, dark-skinned, and lean, dressed in the same leather vest as the one who carried him, was half-crawling out of the entrance, something blue and round cradled carefully in his arms. It looked like a strange, large, robin's egg to Arthur.
But the curious egg was soon forgotten when a terrible sight caught his eye. A cage on wheels filled with bound children around his age. His eyes darted to the side, his heart in his throat. Men with swords walking around the cart, guarding it, watching it. The terror in the eyes of the other children as they huddled in a pitiful heap behind wooden bars. Slavers!
"The moment the boy caught sight of the transport cage, he went wild, " Olek recounted in an even voice.
"He struggled in Reid's arms, kicking and wriggling like a fish. It was nothing to Reid. But then the boy got an arm free and grabbed at Reid's crotch and twisted! The man made this strangest sound- sort of strangled like- and then the boy was on the ground and he was running off with Reid's sword."
"The men were after him immediately, swords drawn." Olek paused and thought of how to describe what happened next. "Our men are the best, m'lord, but the boy gave them a magnificent fight! Reid's broadsword should have been too heavy for the little lad but he heaved it about well enough, though he tired himself out fighting with it. He is clearly well-trained and very talented, sir. I am sure that he is a nobleman's son, most likely an unwanted bastard child who had run away from home- but not before he'd learned the warrior's arts, likely as a way to prove his worth."
"Well, he fought our men off desperately for ten minutes, sir; making up for what he lacks in size, skill, and strength with ferocity and desperation. But when we had him on the ground, bloody and bruised, something happened. It's difficult to understand, let alone explain but . . . " Olek trailed off and tried once more to gather the threads of his tale into coherency.
"Well, there I was, holding the dragon egg, watching the boy fight like a possessed child. But when Reid had him on the ground, fighting for air, face bloody from a cut on his forehead, the boy gave the men this look, like a mad cornered animal. He let out this terrible cry, and then. . ."
Ector leaned his forearms on his knees and watched Olek waving his hands about in the air, carried away in his tale; all his previous fear forgotten. If it had been anyone but his little dark-skinned hound of a right hand man, Ector would believe the tale to be greatly embellished.
"Then it was like a signal was given! Suddenly the egg in my hands was burning hot! I dropped it in my surprise. But it did not break, sir! Not at all! Although I was terrified for a second that it might, but it did not. I am terribly sorry, my lord. It might have broken and. . . and I deserve to die, please!"
"Just continue, Olek." The flesh lord gave him an irritated look, a blank expression on his pale face.
"Yes, m'lord." Olek drew a deep breath and straightened his spine. The lord despised people who lost their composure.
Two weeks ago. . .
Arthur felt the man ease up his hold on his back and the side of his head a moment before he registered the cry of surprise coming from somewhere behind him. It was a moment of opportunity. He could almost hear his combat master's voice screaming at him to move. Throw the man off. Take advantage of his distraction. Now, Arthur! He bucked his whole body, not backwards, but sideways, putting the man leaning his weight on top of Arthur incredibly off balance. From there, it was easy for Arthur to gather up all his lithe young muscles to roll and leap away, out of the circle of men and steel, out of immediate reach.
But when he tried to run he only managed a weak stumble; his leg muscles seizing up in a cramp. He fell groaning to the floor. The men laughed at him and remained where they were.
"Ready to come quietly, little boy?" one of the men said.
Arthur was hardly listening. He had fallen on something round and hard. It had smacked all the air out of him when it hit him in the gut even though he had managed to throw his hands out to absorb his fall. He groaned and was glad that it hadn't been his ribs that had fallen on the object. He was certain it would have cracked or broken. Arthur knew what broken bones felt like. The healing process had driven him mad with boredom and the constant pain had made him a snarling little demon prince for months.
He looked down at the object and found a smooth, blue egg.
A shout in front of him had him raising his head to see the dark-skinned man he had glimpsed holding the egg a while ago leap agilely over a tree root, and walk towards Arthur. Something in his movements had Arthur on edge. The man seemed on edge himself. He looked ready to pounce if Arthur tried to even move a muscle. The men behind him had fallen silent.
Arthur watched the man approach. He didn't know what to do next. He couldn't run, he couldn't fight. A tide of despair washed over him. He saw his life unroll before him, a bleak and endless road filled with nothing but gray misery; a cold, hollow existence. He could only guess what cruelties slaves had to endure, so he couldn't say he knew what awaited him. But he knew what he wouldn't find, wouldn't see ever again if they took him: home.
As soon as he thought that word and felt the longing for it deep in his bones, a surge of strength washed over him, searing his blood like fire. He leapt to his feet and turned, moving so that he had both the approaching man and the group of men behind him in his sights.
From the corner of his eye, he saw that the dark-skinned man had frozen in his tracks. His eyes wide with surprise and disbelief. The circle of men to his right were backing away from him, their swords raised and trembling in their grip.
He looked down at himself and saw that his skin glowed faintly like he'd been lit from within. The early morning sun was shining on him from behind, warming him down to his bones. A thought, fleeting and transient, crossed his mind, attributing this sudden warmth and strength to his mother, watching over him from the otherworld.
And then he saw the dark shadow of wings unfurling on the ground in front of him, seamlessly melting from out of his own shadow so that it seemed as though the wings, featherless, and ridged with spikes at the junctures, were his. They rose like a dark omen from out of his long shadow's back.
Preview of Chapter Three:
Balinor had always been a forgiving man and a pacifist. He believed always in seeing the best in people. And he was always the first to run headlong into risk and danger with no security but his faith in his friends, and in the inherent goodness of men's hearts.
But the moment the rune-covered iron manacles had clamped shut on Kilgharrah's leg, that awful moment of Uther's betrayal, the believing heart within Balinor had torn to pieces and in it's place rose something black and ugly, oozing bitterness into him every day of his lonely exile, for years and years until he brimmed and overflowed with it.