Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [148]
CHAPTER
12
From his vantage point in the woods, the boy had witnessed everything. In the morning there had been the landing of the wondrous dragonship. Then the riotous departure of the band of warriors, and after that, the frightening arrival of the druids. (The boy had been afraid his teachers had come looking for him. He’d been vastly relieved to see the druids had instead come for the woman.)
The druids had gone off without taking any notice of him, which was not surprising. The boy was adept at blending in with his surroundings.
He remained in the woods all that day, unable to take his gaze off the beautiful ship, which was now empty, resting on the sandy bottom, with waves rolling in around it. The boy longed to move closer to the ship, but he was afraid the druids might come back, and so he remained in hiding, trying to work up his courage.
The boy was eleven years old, and he was odd-looking, with his yellow lupine eyes and shaggy, unkempt, gray-brown hair. He was thin and wiry, and he wore the green robes of an ovate—one who studies to become a druidic priest.
The sun sank. Night came. And still the boy crouched in the woods. He’d made a couple of forays in the direction of the ship, but he’d always taken fright and returned to his hiding place.
“They’re not coming back, Wulfe,” she said.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“My sisters told me.”
A graceful young woman, naked except for a smattering of leaves that twined around her lithe body, slipped out of the tree under which Wulfe was hiding. “You can hear the limbs creak with their news.”
Wulfe nodded. He was familiar with the way dryads communicated. Each dryad lived within the tree she guarded and could not leave it. Intensely curious—particularly in regard to the affairs of the Ugly Ones—each dryad avidly watched everything happening around her and gleefully communicated it to her sisters.
“What do they say?” Wulfe asked.
The dryad happily related the news. “My sisters of the sacred grove tell that the priestess drank poison and fell down dead and then the Dragon Goddess entered her body. And my sisters of the strangler fig tree turned bad men into rabbits.”
The dryad giggled at this, and so did Wulfe.
“I wish I had seen that,” he said.
“So do I,” said the dryad. “But you and me—we have seen the great dragonship. Go ahead, Wulfe! You can sneak aboard it while everyone’s gone.”
Wulfe looked longingly at the ship. “I will get into trouble with the elders. . . .”
“Not if they don’t find out,” said the dryad. She had bright green eyes and a pert, sly face with a pointed chin, an upturned nose, and wild russet curls that fell into her eyes. “You don’t have to stay long. Just go on board, look around, and then come back to tell me what it is like. Please! My sisters will be wild with envy!”
“I don’t know. . . .” Wulfe continued to hesitate.
“The elders won’t be back until dawn,” urged the dryad. Her voice was high-pitched and piping, but she could make it soft and wheedling when she wanted. “They are performing some sort of ceremony. You have time.”
Wulfe knew perfectly well he should not trust the dryad. She would do or say anything to satisfy her curiosity. But he had never seen anything so wonderful as this dragonship, and so he let the dryad’s argument persuade him. He crept out of hiding and then halted, not because he was afraid, but to wrestle with his inner daemons, a battle he’d been fighting since the druids had found the four-year-old child running wild in the woods and taken him to live among them.
Wulfe’s inner daemons were continually making the boy do things that landed him in trouble. His battles against them were hard-fought, especially when the daemons urged the boy to do things he didn’t want to do.
This wasn’t so bad. His daemons were urging him to board the dragonship even though he knew he should not. The druids would be angry with him. Well, not angry. The druids were never angry. But they would be disappointed. The druid elder who had raised the boy would