Mistress of Dragons Page 32
“You have to take the baby and leave,” said Draconas.
Bellona did not look at him. If she heard him, she gave no sign.
“You promised her you would care for him,” Draconas said, his voice deliberately harsh, a splash of cold water. “If you don’t leave now, the villagers will find him and they will kill him. And probably us along with him.”
Bellona stared up at him. “Kill him? Kill a baby? Why?”
The child had gone quiet, after that one strange wail. As Draconas knelt down to retrieve this second baby, he remembered Gunderson’s words, It would have been better if the babe had died with the mother and he remembered his answering platitude. You don’t know that. None of us can see the future. Well, that much was true. But he grimaced as he pulled the baby out from under the bed and saw that he was strong and healthy. Unlike his brother, this child’s eyes were wide open. He stared unblinking at the light with an expression of wary watchfulness.
“Look at him,” Draconas told Bellona.
She looked, but did not offer to hold him.
Still wrapped in the bloody rags Draconas had thrown over him, the baby seemed an ordinary infant, except for those oddly knowing eyes. Feather-wisp hair of indeterminate color covered his head; he held his small, clenched fists tight to his chest. His bow-curved lips were pursed shut, as though he had no expectations of this world, was not prepared to make any demands.
“He looks like Melisande,” said Bellona softly. “More than the other.” She reached out to touch his cheek.
Draconas thrust aside the bloody rags, revealing the child, naked.
Bellona gasped in shock, recoiled in horror.
From the groin up, the baby was normal. From the groin down, his legs were hunched like the hind legs of a beast and covered with silvery blue scales. His scaly feet had claws.
“He is her son,” said Draconas, holding the baby out to her. “You promised Melisande you would care for him.”
“He is not her son!” Bellona cried, averting her eyes in revulsion. “He’s a monster.”
“He is her son,” Draconas repeated, relentless. “You promised her as she lay dying that you would take care of him.”
Reluctantly, Bellona looked back at the baby. “I don’t understand.”
“She and Edward made love that day,” Draconas explained. “They had no choice in the matter, either of them. They were meant to love, meant to create a child that day.”
“I don’t understand,” she said again, but this time her tone was dire.
He avoided her question, kept on with what he had to tell. “The first baby born, the elder of the brothers, that child is the son of King Edward.”
“And this one?”
“That was never meant to happen,” Draconas continued. “Another man came to Melisande that night. His intent was also to deliberately get her with child. He attacked Edward and left him for dead and he raped Melisande.”
“I know,” said Bellona. “I saw him. I—”
“—attacked him from behind with your sword. He dropped Melisande and turned to face you and he would have killed you, but something stopped him. What was it?”
“How do you know all that?” Bellona demanded, staring at him.
“What stopped him from attacking you?”
“I heard a snarl. I looked up and there in the sky was a dragon—”
Lifting his hand, Draconas touched her cheek, which was wet with the tears of her grief. Her tears fell on his flesh and, as Bellona looked at him, she saw the human Draconas and, hovering over him, the spirit of a dragon with shining red-orange scales.
“Grald saw me as I truly am,” said Draconas, “and he knew he could not fight me as I truly am. He would have had to change into his real form and he dared not, for fear I would recognize him. He had done what he came to do anyway. He had left his seed inside her. And so he fled.”
“I saw him,” Bellona said, staring far away into that terrible night. “I saw him as I saw you. He is—”
“—the same as the Mistress. The same as myself. The same as”—he sighed softly—”the blood that runs in his child. Dragons. All of us.”
He placed the baby in her unresisting arms. Bellona gazed down at him, bewildered and amazed.
“I have broken the law of my kind to tell you this,” Draconas went on, “for it is a secret that we have kept for thousands of years. A secret no human should know. I won’t require you to keep my secret, for I have not earned the right to ask that of you. I was the one who brought this upon Melisande and when she needed me, I failed her. I ask only that you think about what I am going to say and do what you believe is right.”
Draconas knelt before Bellona, looked up into her eyes.
“Melisande bore a human child, who will grow up gifted with the dragon magic. And she bore a dragon child, who may not even have a chance to grow up, if humans find out the truth about him. They will say he is cursed and they will kill him.
“Maybe he is cursed,” Draconas added softly, his gaze shifting to the baby. He reached out his hand, gently touched the child’s soft cheek. “Maybe he will grow up to be the curse of his people. Or maybe he will grow up to avenge his mother. I don’t know. But I believe he should be given a chance. For her sake.”
From outside, drifting on the air, stinging and acrid as the smoke, came voices.
“The villagers are coming,” said Draconas. “The midwife has told them what she saw. The mob is forming. You can either save him or hand him over to them.”
“You save him,” Bellona said and she held out the baby.
Rising to his feet, Draconas took a step backward. “If I raised him, I would doom him to worse than death. His dragon father wants him and so does the Mistress. They are the ones who sent the warriors here. They were after the baby. They attacked only after they heard the baby’s cry. I am the only one of my kind who has taken human form. Maristara would know to come looking for me and eventually she would find me and the baby. You are one of a vast multitude of humans. You can take the child and vanish.”
Bellona brought the child back to her breast, holding him awkwardly, precariously, for her arms seemed to have gone nerveless. She couldn’t feel them, couldn’t feel anything anymore.
“I don’t understand,” she said for the third time, hard and grating. “I will never understand. What right have you and your kind to meddle in our lives?”
“None,” he replied. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we were trying to make amends.”
Angrily, Bellona snatched the bloody rags from his hands. She wound them round and round the baby. “I will take him. I will raise him. To do what, to be what, I do not know. I’m doing this for Melisande,” she added fiercely. “Not for you.” She placed the baby, wrapped in his mother’s blood, in Melisande’s chill arms. “First, though, I will bury my dead.”
“There’s no time. You hear the mob. They’re on their way. You have to go before they see you. I will care for her.”
Bellona hesitated, not wanting to leave Melisande, but she could hear the truth of his words. Outside the cottage, the clamor of the mob swelled. They had a scapegoat for their misery and they were eager for blood.
Draconas spoke to her again, said something urgent to her. She heard his voice, but it came to her as from a vast distance, drowned by the howls and shouts, drowned by Melisande’s last words, Take care of my sons.
Clutching the baby, half-blind with her tears, Bellona turned and ran from the bed stained with blood. She ran from the death of the woman she had loved as long as she was conscious of being able to love. She stumbled over the bodies on her way out the door, kicked them aside, and paused in the doorway. She saw the mob on its way up the hill. She would not run from them, she decided. She walked calmly out the door, carrying in her arms the baby, silent and uncomplaining, as if he knew his peril. She walked down the hill behind the house, heading for the forest that would swallow her up, swallow the child.
Only later, alo
ne and safe within the green trees, would she recall Draconas’s last words to her.
On the day the dragon’s son asks to know what and who he is, bring him back here to his mother’s tomb.
Draconas stood in the doorway of the cottage. In his mind’s eye, he watched one of Melisande’s sons ride to the city of Ramsgate-upon-the-Aston, where he would be welcomed by a loving mother into a royal house, destined for a life of ease and comfort. He watched Melisande’s other son fleeing death after only a few moments of life, raised by a woman who would find it hard to love him, destined for a life of loneliness and isolation, torment and anger.
Draconas watched until both faded from his view, then he returned to fulfill his promise.
Melisande lay in bloody sheets of the birthing, as her babies had laid in her blood. He placed her right hand on her breast. Lifting her left hand, he clasped the cold, white flesh in his own. He clasped her hand gently, mindful of his talons, which no one could see. No one but himself.
“I never meant for it to come to this, Melisande,” he said quietly. “I am sorry.”
He placed her left hand on top of her right hand, then, lifting up her body in his arms, he walked out of the cottage.
He met the mob charging up the hill, and he stood in front of the open doorway and regarded them in silence. Startled by his composure and unnerved by the specter of death that he bore, a woman, whose face was so lovely and cold and whose long fair hair trailed down to brush the dirt, the villagers lowered their shovels and their rakes and eyed him uneasily.
“The babe must be inside!” the midwife yelled from the back, spurring them on. “It’s a demon I tell you!”
The mob growled and several men in front lunged forward. Draconas cast a glance behind him.
The cottage erupted in flame, fire so fierce that the flames seared the faces of those in the front ranks.
The villagers gave a collective gasp, then falling and tumbling over each other, they turned tail and raced back down the hillside, shrieking that the devil was loose among them.
Draconas walked on, carrying Melisande down the road that led to the river.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE SONGS QUOTED IN THE TEXT ARE, IN ORDER OF presentation:
“Deuil Angoisseux,” by Christine de Pisan
“When to Her Lute Corinna Sings,” by Thomas Campion
“With Garments Flowing,” by John Clare
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS