Juoth stopped and did not turn. Facing forward and only forward and his words swept back on the wind. “There is no such thing as magic.”
Brack smiled. “There is and I've seen it.”
“You think someone used magic to bring a dragon that was killed two hundred years ago back to life. That's what you think.”
“Believe what you want. I have no other explanation for it.”
Juoth wheeled then, his eyes flashing. “There are a thousand. The dragon didn't die. The story you heard is wrong. Your great grandfather didn't kill it at all. It is a different dragon. Pick the one you like. They're all more likely than magic.”
Brack did not answer then but just looked at him and they two sat in the road. Far off on the wing, a bird called, a low and sorrowful sound that carried to them over endless distance and the bird itself not even visible in the sky. But returning now to these lands in which it lived, the dragon far off and searching elsewhere for its prey. At long last Juoth turned the horse again and kept on down the road and Brack watched and then followed him and beside them the small mountains rose with their stone caverns and the secrets they kept.
Chapter Eleven
They took the road on into the evening and about them the cedars rose up to saw the sky and the stones grew to great heights so that the road went through them and it was like riding in canyons of shadow and darkness and the ground littered there with smaller stones as if at some time long ago a stonemason twice the size of any man alive in the world which they inhabited had come and crouched and there inscribed some words or shapes now lost to the wind and rain and age. These small stones the mere chippings of his work. That unfathomable giant a ghost now moving in this place.
Perhaps the shapes and names carved there of gods and dragons.
It was in one of these passes that a shadow fell over them. The two stones between which they rode had in millennia past been one, and it had split in a jagged line down the middle at some time unknown. Both sides towering twenty feet above them and four times that long. The road well worn and many travelers having taken this path. Moss and lichen covering these new faces and on the top cedars growing from the very stone itself and their thin roots moving under the moss like veins.
The horse shied and stumbled as the shadow fell and in that heartbeat Brack knew how they'd ridden themselves into this prison on their own and there was nowhere to run. Dragonfire could fill the slender canyon like a molten tide, the flames rolling over themselves and billowing up to scorch the sky. Men and horses both turned to ash. The smoke of their bodies spinning skyward to mix with the clouds and perhaps later to return them to the fields and dirt and thus to complete the cycle that all men must make.
Juoth was off his horse faster than could be followed, sliding with barely a movement and bringing the bow up as he fell. The arrow nocked before he touched the ground and drawn as he crouched. Brack did not dismount but swung also the crossbow from the saddle with its bolt already in place and twisted upward to track the beast on the wing.
They waited and the minutes ground by and nothing came. Neither shadow nor the beast itself. He held the bow aloft on shaking arms and the horse pranced slightly and when he finally put it down he half expected the shadow to return and mock his lack of vigilance, but it did not.
Juoth turned and looked at him as he pulled himself back atop the horse. His breathing heavy. “Maybe it was just a bird.”
“If it was I haven't seen one like it before.”
“There are a lot of things you haven't seen.”
“There are a lot I have.”
Sitting then in silence and breathing the world's bones and the predestination etched in them. The time now for flight but standing in that place and waiting. For a man who believes his death is upon him must know and all else falls aside and he will find out or he will die and in doing learn that the fates have cast their lots and he has come up wanting. But he must know and he will always do what he can to know and so they waited to see what would come to them and nothing did.
For now and in this ringing silence, both of them alive. The shadow of the beast fallen and fled. They were a long time looking at the sky and then finally they put their heels into the horses and went on through that canyon and out the other side and still there was nothing in the sky to see and they rode on. But the feeling remained in his spine for a long time and he rode with the crossbow in his hands and when it got heavy he shifted it and would not put it down.
After a time the ground began to rise more below them and the road twisted in and ran along the side of a sheer stone cliff. The cracks running upward through the red and gray rock and the marks of the water coming down and at some points ledges where birds sat and looked down and called to them. Along the roadside a flashing of metal and Brack looked to it as they passed and saw an ancient breastplate in the tall grass and above it a man's skull. The lines and cracks in it like the ledges above and all the rest of him gone and Brack could imagine this man trying for reasons that would forever be his own to climb that cliff in his armor and the stone loose and dusted beneath his fingers. Eventually those fingers slipping off and the man's scream as he fell and the shower of stone around him as his body first slid and then dropped free of the wall and he fell in nothingness to his end. His broken body food for the wolves that stalked out of the timber at night with their eyes yellow and luminous.
When they came to the pass where they would move up and through the mountains and into the plain, it was tall around them and a stream ran through the center, moving swiftly with them over the smooth stones. Banks of grass and scrub trees. A dirt path where those who did not want to go in the water went up the side, but they ignored it and walked the horses into the stream and it flowed about their legs with the hair brown and dark and the water breaking cool and swirling around them.
Juoth stood his horse and turned in the saddle. Looking up at the high walls rising on either side. “You want to get out of it?”
“I don't see how.”
“It's like the stone, but I can't see the end.” Nodding in the direction they traveled. The canyon again pinning them on both sides, a beautiful channel for destruction and death.
“You think it's the fastest?”
He nodded.
“All right.”
They went on, looking again to the sky. But Juoth more than Brack, for Juoth knew dragons and how they hunted and what they would do to prey trapped in a flowing river by stone walls, and Brack knew this dragon and what it wanted and it was leading them and drawing on strings and they were following as they were told. But it would not kill them here for if it was just the kill that it wanted, it could have had it long ago.
They'd ridden this stream on the dripping horses for just over two hours when they found the dead girl.
The man was kneeling in the stones at the edge of the stream with the girl's head in his lap and her hair light and soaked and flowing in the river, twisting in the current. He had his head down and he looked up as they came around the bend. His beard thin and dark on his face, his eyes wide, his hands on the girl's arms as they lay limply at her sides. The color gone from all of it. Washed from the world. Her feet in the water and already a dull gray though Brack knew she had not been dead long.
They drew the horses up and stood them and looked at the man and his jaw worked and he did not say anything. Did not raise his hand to them in greeting or to fend them off. Brack looked at him for a moment and then got down from the horse and went to them.
There was less blood than there should have been and all he could think was that the river had taken it and with her heart still and dead in her chest that was the end of it. The break jagged along her temple. The rock lying there in the short weeds. He could see the laceration and within it the ripped skin now turning white and even under that the white of her skull where it had broken. There were no other wounds on her body and it had taken her all at once.