“I want you to ask him,” Brack said. “Tell him what you told me.”
“Your grandfather.”
“When he gets here.”
Juoth considered this and took from his pocket a pipe and neither filled nor lit it and put the end into his mouth and chewed it. A thing of wood and paper. Then he took it out and he held it in one hand and said:
“Your grandfather already thinks everything I've said. He agreed when I told him.” Tapping the pipe against his own cheekbone. “Perhaps not in these specifics but we've thought it of dragons for a long time now.”
Brack lifted his own mug and drank and then placed it on the table. “He sent you.”
The man nodded.
“Where is he?”
“He'll be here.”
“When?”
“I see you have his patience.”
“You're about to find out just how thin it is.”
Behind the islander a door opened. The barkeep did not look up but the blind singer turned toward the sound. The spearman also though he was now little better than blind himself.
The man who stepped through the door could have been Brack in an older life. Tall and thick in the shoulders and arms, but with his hair and beard stark white instead of the rich brown shot through with red that it had once been. Standing straight and wearing the dark leather and fur of this place. Unarmed to the eye but walking as a man armed. He came forward and Brack stood and went to him and embraced him and stepped back and the man did not release his shoulders.
“I'm sorry about what happened to them.”
Brack nodded. His face tight.
“We sent a man. To tell you what we'd seen.”
“You saw it before?”
“Only once. More often traces of it. Fires in the forest and bones and dark shapes in the night sky. Enough to send a man.”
“He never came.”
“It was only days ago.”
“Sit with us,” Brack said. “It's good at least to see you.”
They sat and the old man leaned forward with his arms on the table and bent at the elbows and the barkeep came over with mugs for all of them and grunted and left. The blind man took up his song again and it was an older tune that had many words that changed depending on where you were when you sang it and here he sang about the mountains and the snow but elsewhere Brack had heard it sung of sun and sand and birds on the wing and forests thick with trees and endless plains.
“I sent him out to make sure you stayed,” he said. Nodding to the islander. “I had to get something to show you.”
Brack closed his eyes for just a moment. In all the times he had heard something like that the thing he'd been shown had never made his life any easier. He felt he could still see the firelight in the darkness and he opened his eyes again. The spots still dancing.
His grandfather reached into his cloak and took out what appeared to be a small black stone. The light bright off the slick surface. Too perfectly shaped and thin to be a stone and the surface itself moving like pooled ink. He raised it and handed it across and already Brack new what it was and he took it.
It was heavier than it should have been. Something ancient and unnatural in that weight. Still warm from the heat that would perhaps never fade. He turned it in his hands and there was no blood on it at all. Shed the way a snake sheds its skin. Death and decay and rebirth. Under it all moving a wretched sickness.
Holding the scale against his palm. Feeling in it a great many things and below it all his own wrath and sorrow and that scorching heat. Pressing his fingers into it as if to snap it in half and feeling it bend just so.
“You're going after it,” his grandfather said. “That's why you're here.”
“Yes.”
“Juoth.”
“Of course.” The man stood and went to the bar and sat and the barkeep looked at him for a moment and then handed him another ale.
“You don't trust him?”
“I trust him with my life. But you don't. Not yet.”
“Who is he?”
“He works with me. I'm not as young as I was.”
“You thought this was coming.”
“Didn't you?”
Brack turned, looking to the window. Everything outside was dark but for the snow that blew against the glass and stood in stark whiteness and piled along the outer sill. All else lost. But somewhere out in that swirling cold the beast curling with its eyes alight and the snow about it melted in a wide circle to withered grass.
“You'd have fought it. With him. If it came here first.”
“Someone has to.”
“It would have killed you.”
“I know.”
“Does he?”
The old man smiled. “You talked to him.”
“How much? Of us.”
“Nothing. I mean, he knows what everyone else knows of you. I haven't told him anything else.”
“All right.”
“So why do you need me? I'm just an old man. You could have gone to the gap with the rest of them.”
Brack shook his head. Tapped the scale on the table and then handed it back across. “I needed to see if you knew anything. Patterns. Movements. I didn't know it was here until we heard the wings coming up the slope and there was no mistaking it and everything was destroyed before I could get there. I don't know how I missed it. Got careless.”
“Or it got careful.” Putting the scale away into his cloak, this thing of fire and hatred and age. “Knew you were there and hid and struck when you were gone. That's what I'd do.”
“So you haven't seen it?”
“Just what I told you. We knew one was around and saw little signs but nothing you can track. I don't think it's been here long. I don't know when it got here or if it's nested or where.”
Brack leaned back in the chair. “Then I'll just hunt it the old way.”
“You want an old man's advice?”
“Of course.”
“Don't hunt it at all.”
Neither spoke for a moment. All about them the room now fuller than it had been and the door behind opening and closing as more came in to escape the cold. The fire raging in the hearth in the far wall and the blind man playing on and on and the barkeep passing the glass mugs down the length of the bar and someone laughing and one of the women now back from above and that man leaving as others entered. Brack listened to it, this life and fullness and then said:
“I have to.”
“I know that. As I have to tell you not to.” His eyes bright as he tapped the table with a finger. “There have always been dragons in this world and men have always hunted them and they're still here. If you think you can change that, then you're a fool.”
“I don't,” Brack said. “All I can do is balance it.”
This man, so long lost but bound always by blood and something deep in that like an intangible knowledge, looked at him a long moment. Nodding in the way that they both shared. Then he took up his mug and drank it all and set it back down again. Wiped his beard with the back of his hand and smiled, his eyes still bright. “If I were really your grandfather,” he said. “Then maybe you'd listen to me.”
Brack grinned at that and stood. “Maybe I would.”
And it was in that moment that the spearman finally did what he had been meaning to do and stood and climbed unsteadily atop his chair and raised his mug above those below and yelled to them. The voices in the room fell to nothing and the blind man alone kept on playing and the spearman yelled about dragons in the mountains and the keep burned and all dead. These lies but he had not asked for the truth and gave this version of it.
Protests at first from those below, and then laughter, and then nothing. A sort of horrible and wrenching silence as they saw he was more than a man drunk and they turned as he pointed to where Brack stood. Eyes full of fear and realization. But Brack and the other two had already gone to the door and they went out into the night and could hear still the spearman yelling about what would come to them. This doom and destruction called down from the heavens or up from the pits of the earth where the dragon was born in fire. As they walked through the snow toward the cabin Brack was for just one moment again in the burning yard and watching the horse screaming and twisting in the fireflame, and he knew everything the spearman had said was true and had merely yet to come to pass.