Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [24]
Skylan frowned. He had a few silver ingots and coins in his coffer, but he was saving all his wealth to pay the bride-price for Aylaen.
“I don’t want your silver!” Owl Mother scoffed, seeing the doubt on his face. “You must agree to serve me for one day, do whatever I ask of you. Don’t worry,” she added dryly, “I won’t ask you to dance with me naked in the moonlight.”
Skylan’s face burned. He didn’t know what to say. He wanted to be polite, but he couldn’t imagine a more repulsive sight.
Owl Mother laughed at him. “I need a man for only one thing these days, and that’s to help me with chores. There’s wood to be chopped and pens to be mended and—”
“I will serve you, Owl Mother,” said Skylan hastily. He wanted to get this over with.
“Very well. I will do what I can. The magic is chancy, uncertain. I don’t promise anything.”
Owl Mother walked over to the part of the room concealed by the tapestry. She drew on a large leather glove and reached out her hand to pull the tapestry aside. Pausing, she glanced at Skylan.
“You must hold perfectly still,” she warned him. “Do not speak or cry out, no matter what you see. She is a young one and startles easily.”
Owl Mother disappeared behind the tapestry. He could hear an annoyed-sounding squawk and then Owl Mother’s voice speaking softly, lovingly, clucking and cajoling. Owl Mother came out from behind the tapestry. Perched on her gloved arm was an enormous bird. Skylan thought at first it was the largest hawk he’d ever seen.
Owl Mother drew closer, bringing the bird into the light.
Skylan was so astonished, he started to rise off the stool, then remembered, too late, he was not to make any sudden moves. The bird was not a bird. The bird was a beast, and the beast was a wyvern. At Skylan’s involuntary start, the wyvern reared back her head, flapped her wings, and screeched at him.
“I warned you to keep still, fool!” Owl Mother hissed angrily.
Skylan froze and forced himself to sit quietly, though his muscles shook with the effort. He liked to think he wasn’t afraid of anything, but magic was different. The bravest, boldest warrior could be excused for fearing the power of those who had been old when the gods themselves were young. His stomach clenched and his bowels gripped.
The wyvern’s red eyes glared at him. Her reptilian scales glistened orange in the firelight. Her wings, made of membrane stretched between the fine, delicate bones, were so thin he could see the light shine through them. Her long tail curled over Owl Mother’s wrist. Two clawed feet dug into the leather glove.
The wyvern looked deceptively like a dragon, but there was no relation, as Skylan well knew. He was accustomed to dragons, who had long been allies of the Vindrasi. The spiritbone of the great Dragon Kahg hung from a nail on the mast of the dragonship. The spirit of the dragon sailed with them, and when summoned by the prayers of the Bone Priestess, the dragon would take on physical form to join Skylan and his forces in battle.
Dragons were thinking, reasoning, intelligent beings, gifted with miraculous powers bestowed on them by their Dragon Goddess, Vindrash, consort of Torval.
The Vindrasi believed wyverns were made of magic in mockery of dragons. Wyverns belonged to the Nethervold, the twilight world of the fae folk. Most of mankind could not see the Nethervold. But there were some, like Owl Mother, who had learned how to draw aside the curtain of moonbeams and stardust that kept the two worlds apart. She had now opened that curtain for Skylan, and he was sorry he’d ever agreed to come.
“I think I should go. . . .” He spoke through stiff lips.
“Don’t move, and keep your mouth shut,” Owl Mother told him. “Or you’ll get us both killed.”
Holding the nervous wyvern on her arm, Owl Mother dipped her fingers in Skylan’s blood and traced a rune on his forehead and a similar rune on her own forehead. She placed her hand on the rune on Skylan’s head and began to hum.
Her humming grew louder and louder, a single, jarring,