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‘Dragons don’t kill humans’ I well-remembered my father telling me, ‘unless they are provoked’. And yet it was common knowledge that dragons killed people. Everyone knew someone whose mother’s cousin’s best friend’s milk maid knew someone who had told her about someone who knew someone who had been killed by a dragon. Which made it as good as fact. Certainly, it was enough to scare people.
Dragon’s looks were against them. They looked terrifying and so we were terrified of them. And they were carnivores and hunters, taking livestock and other animals. It stood to reason that they could kill humans. But, apparently, they didn’t.
“What do we do if we see one?” asked one of the younger men.
“Ride for cover,” said Buck, with the confidence of someone who has no actual experience.
As one man, the group looked around the vast openness of the wilderness. If you had the time and inclination, you could find small stands of trees and even a few that were large enough to be called a wood, but for the most part, the wind scoured the landscape clear of anything taller than a bush. This was a land of grass and scrub, and even that had to be as tough as leather to survive.
“What sort of cover are we talking about?” asked another man (whose name might have been Vassek—I hadn’t picked up on all of their names yet).
“You hide under your horse.” Devon’s voice had none of the solid authority with which Buck had spoken, and yet it instantly commanded more respect because he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.
“The dragon will ignore the horse?” asked the young man.
Devon cocked a smile. “No. The dragon will carry off the horse rather than you. It’s kill or be killed out here.”
“Dragons can carry off horses?”
“The big ones can,” nodded Devon. “One this size…” He looked at the footprint critically. “Might just kill the horse here, eat what it can, and carry the rest back to its family.”
“Dragons don’t have families,” scoffed Vorst.
“No?” Devon asked, his left eyebrow arching.
Vorst laughed. “You think they all sit together over dinner in a cave? Mummy dragon, Daddy dragon, and the three little kiddies, chowing down as a family on some poor bastard who just happened to be out for a walk? Never happen. They’re no better than animals.”
Devon said nothing. He had a way of looking amused by something without smiling, as if he was laughing inwardly at a joke that no one else got.
“Families…” It was the first word I’d heard Uther say that day. And one of only a handful he’d said since we’d been captured by these men.
Uther had been staring hard at the dragon print as if it was a puzzle to be deciphered, though who knew what he saw when he looked at it. I could only guess at how he saw the world now, but I guessed it was different to what we saw.
“Dragons…” The old man started muttering frantically under his breath. I could only catch a few of the words from the spill of unintelligible nonsense. “… years… the blood on my hand… Tarascon... apples… Wantley… I said… I promised...”
“Shut up, you bumbling, old fool,” snarled Vorst, and Uther’s voice dropped, though he kept muttering and his eyes stayed on the footprint as long as it was in sight as we rode on.
It seemed more and more certain to me that we were headed for Latran, where King Harker now ruled, with my sister Rhea alongside him. Although, knowing Rhea, I wondered who was doing the ruling.
I was also becoming more and more certain that the mercenaries, even up to Buck, didn’t know who Uther and I were or why they were taking us to Latran. Perhaps they didn’t even know they were being paid by the queen there (as I was sure they were). We were just a job, just two people with a bounty on our heads that they were anxious to collect. I wondered if knowing the truth might sway them, might make them pity us, or let us go. But more likely, they would just increase their asking price.
***
After I’d been banished, the marriages of my sisters to the princes of Latran and Gaunt went ahead as planned. As for Wincham itself, now that I was disowned, my father decided to split the royal prerogative between his two ‘remaining’ daughters, so both Rhea and Sylvia could claim to be Queens of Wincham, or at least some part of it. But that wasn’t the same as ruling it. They would be queens and would enjoy certain privileges and a degree of power, but the actual governing of Wincham would pass into the stewardship of Lord Jonas until there was a direct male heir to Uther’s bloodline. In other words, whichever of my sisters produced a boy first, that boy would become king, and would reign when he came of age.
But while my father was happy enough to die knowing that his descendants would rule a lowland empire, my sisters didn’t have that sort of patience. They saw Wincham as their birthright.
I didn’t wholly disagree with them: I saw no reason a woman couldn’t rule as well as a man (or better). But I did disagree with their methods.
They could have waited until our father was dead before making their move—perhaps then it would have had more legitimacy—but Jonas would be a strong ruler who would defend Wincham stoutly; it would be his duty as steward. My father was old and weak, and refused to believe that his daughters would move against him. That made him an easy target.
The sudden and unexpected deaths of the kings of Latran and Gaunt should have told him the lengths to which Rhea and Sylvia were prepared to go. Princes Harker and Titus became kings of their respective nations, with my sisters as their queens, and shortly after, the armies of both were mobilized, marching into Wincham.
As my sisters had presumably hoped, King Uther did nothing, even as advisors begged him to take action. Instead, he insisted that the armies marching towards the capital were just his daughters coming to visit. Too late did anyone realize that this self-delusion was the first symptom of a total mental breakdown induced by the betrayal of his daughters.
Perhaps I took my share of the blame for that—I’d been the first to betray him.
Wincham’s capital was the fortified city of Farringcourt, built to withstand any onslaught and self-sufficient enough to hold out against a long siege. The two armies surrounded it and demanded that King Uther be handed over.
