The farmer cut his first to show them they could and put the cut piece in his mouth and looked at Juoth. “Just follow this one until the swamp where the creek holds up. Then it goes up and to the east, though the treeline. There's a ridge there and on top is the road. Take it from there and you'll be in the plains in two days and at Cabele in four. Darish-Noth is another day's ride if you want it.”
They ate and the meat was very good and full of salt. The woman got up after a moment as if remembering something and the farmer waved her down and back to her food and he stood instead and went out the door and came back with another pitcher. This one of ale frothing still from the cask. He took their empty cups and poured and Brack drank deeply and felt it almost immediately in his blood and drank again.
When the food was done the farmer looked at his sons and they both stood and took away the dishes and then went out through some other door for Brack did not see them again but shortly heard them in the yard. Marna went to sit in the main room and the farmer sat back in his chair with the noon light on the top of his head and picked his teeth.
“You should stay here the night,” he said. “Sleep and rest the horses. They're about beat, those ones. Then take the road in the morning.” He nodded at Juoth, eyes flickering to the burned and halfhealed skin along his hairline. “Marna can give you something for that.”
“Thank you,” Juoth said. “But we can't.”
“Afraid it'll get to Cabele before you?”
“It will anyway,” Brack said. “But it's what we can do.”
For in that, he knew, it was toying with him always. It could be upon Cabele in hours and by the time they arrived it could have reduced it to ash and bone, stone and cinder. So always it was far enough ahead, even as they closed the distance. But it wanted him to see Cabele and to see the fire and to hear the screams of the dying and to know Kayhi was among them.
And for that want he would kill it. For in this creature birthed of fire that could destroy the world, it was the one weakness.
But that was how you hunted, for everything had a weakness. And killing was only the art of finding it and knowing how to use it and then using it when the time came.
They rode out an hour later and each with a skin of ale and more of the dried meat for the trip and the farmer went with them as far as the road. Pointing to them the way and then shaking their hands, clasping each about the forearm and saying not a word of the gold but thanking them for it all the same. Brack looked back after they had gone a ways and he was still sitting his horse in the road and watching them.
It took the better part of an hour to reach the swamp. A deep and dark thing with mud all up to the road and a dense look to it that felt unnatural in this land of open fields breaking to plains. The sound of birds and other things within. The creek running to it just as the farmer had said. They turned there to the east and soon crossed another short field and went through the treeline and into a thin forest of cedars and birches with their bark peeling like pink paper and the ground below them a bed of brown needles and they rode through this for a short time. The ground beginning to swell beneath them and then rising in a ridge. The horses breathing hard with the effort, the soil full of sand. They at last came out on top of the ridge and there was the road before them, an old thing of beaten dirt and grass and sand and with boulders standing at places on either side of it, the rolled destruction of some prior land, the road snaking through them and moving down this spine of hills and out of sight.
They stopped shortly and let the horses breathe and looked out over the country. On their left a string of short mountains, an open valley between them. Barren to the dead and dried grass, not even scrub cedars in that withered expanse. The trees returning on the side of the mountains in groves, but these nothing like the mountains they'd just ridden down out of or the true mountains of the north beyond. That an endless world of stone and snow, these short mountains that could be ridden over in a few hours and put behind, hardly true to their name. Forested hills and shallow valleys.
Beyond them, on the far plains, the stone walls of Cabele.
They followed the road and the day grew hot and Brack took off his furs and packed them and then rode in his leather armor, the mail and plate strapped also to the horse's sides. If the dragon came he would be horribly exposed but it would not come. The worst things to fear now were the wolves and bears and either he could handle as he was.
They saw one of those bears off to the east and at the bottom of the ridge, standing with his great padded feet in the cool river and his head turned and looking up at them as they passed. The horses shied but did not run.
It was two hours later when Juoth spoke into the silence and the light wind. The ridge had been rising below them and turning to merge with the mountains and the drop on either side was near a thousand feet, down through boulders and grass. The slope so steep he could not stand on it and little could grow. The horses rode one behind the other but Juoth did not have to speak loudly to be heard in this deserted world.
“Your great grandfather didn't kill it,” he said.
“You've been thinking about it.”
“Of course I have.”
“And that's what you think.”
“That's what I think.”
Brack nodded and looked into the mountains, still above them. The dark path of the road visible going up into the stones and trees. “I know he killed it.”
“I'm sure he thought he did, but it's the only thing that fits. He wounded the dragon and it lived. It wouldn't be the first time. Dragons are great deceivers. It could have been an intentional move for survival.”
“I'm telling you he killed it.”
“I heard you.”
Brack reined the horse up and trotted it sideways in the road, turning so they faced each other. Crossing his arms and sitting back in the saddle. Juoth stopped as well and regarded him.
“My great grandfather killed it, first with the bow and then with the sword. Through the ribs and into the heart. When it was dead, he took an ax and he cut off the beast's head. Then they buried the body in the mountains and they buried the head in a lake. Leagues apart. And then the city feasted, for the threat of a generation was gone and they no longer had to look to the sky every time they heard something on the wing or saw a shadow moving through the grass.”
Juoth was silent. As if knowing he was not done.
“When I saw it, at the keep. I saw its neck. Have you ever seen a man hanged who lived? The burn of the rope on his skin, a scar bitten into him for all time. The dragon has a scar like that around its neck, a ring where the scales no longer grow. Right at the place where my great grandfather took its head off with the ax. It still carries those marks and it always will.”
Juoth would not look at him. Looking instead down over the countryside and then up at the mountains and anywhere but at his eyes.
“Well?”
“You mean magic.” A weight to the words.
“I do.”
Juoth pulled back on the reins with the hand without the glove and brought the horse's head up and went past Brack on the side of the road. Not turning his head and his back straight. Brack watched him go and turned the horse with him but did not follow. Leaning forward and resting his arms. Then he said:
“You think I'm wrong?”