The Dragon Charmer Read online

  The dark is always waiting. Behind the light, beyond reality, behind the visions in the smoke. Look now, look at the egg. It glows with cold, its white shell sheened like clouded ice, the velvet that wraps it crackling with frost. It is secreted in a casket of ebony bound with iron, but the metal is chilled into brittleness, the lock snaps even as the lid is shut, tampering fingers are frozen into a blue numbness. It has lain there for many centuries, a sacred charge on its caretakers, or so they believe, having no knowledge of what it is they cherish, or for Whom. The image returns often, its mystery still unrevealed. Maybe it is a symbol: the deepest, truest magic frequently manifests itself through symbols. Maybe it is just what it appears to be. An egg. If so, then we at least can guess what lies curled within, unhatching, sleeping the bottomless sleep of a seed in midwinter. The men who watch over it have gentle hands and slender, otherworldly features. They do not suspect the germ of darkness that incubates within the egg.

  The picture shifts, pulling back, showing us for the first time that the casket stands on an altar of stone, and the altar is in a circular chamber, and the chamber … the chamber is at the top of a lonely tower, jutting like a tooth into the blue mountain air. A few pieces of the pattern fall into place. Others drift, disembodied, like jigsaw fragments from the wrong puzzle.

  “Why there?” asks Sysselore, forever scathing. “A monastery, I suppose, remote, almost inaccessible—but almost is never enough. Why not hide it outside the world?”

  “Magic finds out magic. Who would look for such an object in the hands of Men? It has been safe in ignorant hands, hidden in plain view, one of a thousand holy relics guarded by monks in a thousand mountain retreats. They will have cradled it in their own legends, endowed it with a dozen meanings. No one has ever sought it there.”

  Somewhere in the tower a bell is struck, drowning out the rumor of the wind in the chimes and the rise and fall of the chant. The swelling of its single note fills the cave; the walls seem to shake; flakes of earth drop from above. The tower trembles in its sky gulf. Or perhaps it is the smoke that trembles, unbalancing the picture. We see the egg again, but it is no longer cold. Heat pulses from within, turning the thick shell to translucency. Bent over it is a dark face among the golden ones, dark as the wood of the casket, a face subtle as poison, sharp as a blade. The gaze is lowered: it does not seek concealed watchers now. Its whole attention is focused on the egg. The throb of the bell is a long time dying. And then comes another sound, a tiny crack, echoless, all but inaudible, yet the aftershock of that minute noise makes the very floor vibrate. The shell fractures, seamed by countless thread lines that glow with a red light as if from a fire in its heart. The ruby glow touches the dark face leaning closer, ever closer, fascinated, eager…

  The egg hatches.

  “What now?” whispers Sysselore, and the quiet in her voice is almost that of awe. “Where will it go? They cannot call it holy now, and… it won’t stay hidden. Not long.”

  “We shall see.”

  “What’s happening?” Will asked the darkness. “Even allowing for circumstances, I’ve never known Fern so on edge.”

  “I dinna ken,” said the darkness, predictably. “But there’s Trouble coming. I can smell him.”

  * * *

  The smoke thins, swirls, re-forms, showing us great events and small. The moor unrolls like a carpet beneath a sky tumbling with clouds. The valley opens, the hillside plunges, the wind rushes in from the sea. And there is the house, lifting blind windows to the rain. Behind closed curtains there is firelight and lamplight, the murmur of conversation, the smell of roasting meat uncoiling from the oven. The sunless evening blurs gradually into night. When dinner is long over, feet climb the stairs to bed. A glass tumbler stands alone on a sideboard in the kitchen, containing a small measure of golden liquid. Not discarded or forgotten but placed there deliberately. A gesture. Presently the house-goblin materializes, sitting on the end of the table. He samples the leftover roast and drains the tumbler, declaiming an incomprehensible toast, probably to the red-bearded laird who swatted his foes with a tree trunk. Then he roams through the house, patrolling his domain.

  In a bedroom on the second floor a girl is seated in front of an antique dressing table, studying herself in the mirror. There is no vanity in her contemplation: her expression is grave and unusually detached. She stares at her reflection, you feel, simply because it is there. Yet she might be termed beautiful, if mere youth is beauty, clarity of skin and eye, elfin slenderness of body. I was beautiful once, I and Morgun, my twin, but beauty alters with time, as all else, and in a different age Helen wears a different face. So maybe she is beautiful, this pale, dispassionate girl, with her gravity and her small breasts. Fashion is a poor judge of such things. The adjacent lamp puts a gloss on her short hair that it may not merit and shades the molding of invisible bones. But as we look closer I see something in her face, or in its reflection, something beneath the unblemished exterior. Imperceptible. Almost familiar. A secret too well hidden, a scar too perfectly healed. It shows in a certain fragility, a certain strength, a trace element of pain. But the image begins to withdraw from her, and the flicker of not-quite-recognition is gone.

  The goblin, too, is watching her, just inside the door, his crouched body only a shadow in the corner to the discerning eye. Even the mirror cannot see him. She is still staring at her reflection but now the direction of her gaze switches to a point beyond her shoulder. Her eyes widen; shock or fury expels the hint of color from her cheek. To us, the glass is empty, but she sees the intruder. She sees him in the mirror. “Get out!” She rounds on him, screaming like a virago. “Toad! Contemptible little sneak! Creeping in here, spying on me—how dare you! How dare you! Get out, do you hear? If I see even your shadow again, I’ll I’ll squeeze you to pulp I’ll blast you into Limbo—I’ll blow your atoms to the four winds! Don’t you ever—ever!—come near me again!” The unleashing of power is sudden and terrifying: her hair crackles with it, the air thickens around her outstretched fingers. The goblin vanishes in a flash of startled horror. She is on her feet now but her rage ebbs as rapidly as it came, and she casts herself facedown on the bed, clutching the pillow, sobbing briefly and violently. When the storm is over she lifts her head; she is red eyed and tearless, as if tears were a rain that would not come. Her expression reverts to a wary stillness: her gaze roves round the room. “It’s gone,” she murmurs, “I know it’s gone, but… there’s someone… somewhere… watching me.”

  “She feels us,” says Sysselore. “The power. Did you see the power in her…?”

  “Hush.”

  The picture revolves cautiously as I lean forward, close to the smoke; the fire draft burns my face. I am peering out of the mirror, into the room, absorbing every detail, filling my mind with the girl. This girl. The one I have waited for.

  Slowly she turns, drawn back to the mirror, staring beyond the reflections. Our eyes meet. For the second time, the watcher becomes the watched. But this is no threat, only reconnaissance. A greeting. In the mirror, she sees me smile.

  She snatches something—a hairbrush?—and hurls it at the glass, which shatters. The smoke turns all to silver splinters, spinning, falling, fading. In the gloom after the fire dies, Sysselore and I nurse our exultation.

  She is the one. At last.

  I will have her.

  IV

  Fern devoted the following morning to final preparations and thank-you letters, which she, being efficient, penned beforehand. Then there were long phone calls—to the caterers, to prospective guests, to Marcus Greig. Will, not so much unhelpful as uninvolved, removed Gaynor from the scene and took her for a walk.

  “What do you make of it all?” he asked her.

  “Make of what?” she said, her mind elsewhere. “You mean—that business of Alison Redmond? Or—”

  “Actually,” said Will, “I meant Marcus Greig. Who’s been talking to you about Alison? Fern tries never to mention her.”

  “Gus Dinsdale,
” Gaynor explained. She continued hesitantly: “I don’t want to be nosy, but I can’t help wondering… Was her death really an accident? You’re both rather—odd—aboutit.”

  “Oh no,” said Will. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  Gaynor stopped and stared at him, suddenly very white. “N-not Fern—?”

  Will’s prompt laughter brought the color flooding back to her cheeks. “You’ve been thinking in whodunits,” he accused. “Poor Gaynor. A Ruth Rendell too many!”

  “Well, what did happen?” demanded Gaynor, feeling foolish.

  “The truth is less mundane,” Will said. “It often is. Alison stole a key that didn’t belong to her and opened a Door that shouldn’t be opened. I wouldn’t call that an accident.”

  “Gus said something about a flood?”

  Will nodded. “She was swept away. So was Fern—she was lucky to survive.”

  Gaynor felt herself becoming increasingly bewildered, snatching at straws without ever coming near the haystack. “I gather Fern was ill,” she said. “They thought—Gus and Maggie that she would have told me, only she never has. Some sort of post-traumatic shock?”

  “Shock leading to amnesia, that’s what the doctors said. They had to say something. She was gone for five days.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “To shut the Door, of course. The Door Alison had opened. The flood had washed it away” He was studying her as he spoke, his words nonsense to her, his expression inscrutable. She could not detect either mockery or evasion; it was more as if they were speaking on different subjects, or in different languages.

  “Can we start again?” she said. “With Alison. I was told—She was a girlfriend of your father’s?”

  “Maybe,” said Will. “She slipped past Fern for a while. But she wasn’t really interested in Dad.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She stole a key—”

  “I mean, what did she do for a living?”

  “She worked in an art gallery in London. At least, that was what you might call her cover.”

  “Her cover? She was a crook?”

  “Of course not.” He smiled half a smile. “Well, not in the sense you mean.”

  “In what sense, then?”

  “She was a witch,” said Will.

  She looked for the rest of the smile, but it did not materialize. The narrowing of his eyes and the slight crease between his brows was merely a reaction against the sun. His expression was unfathomable.

  After a pause that lasted just a little too long, she said: “Herbal remedies—zodiac medallions—dancing naked round a hilltop on Midsummer’s Eve? That sort of thing?”

  “Good Lord no,” Will responded mildly. “Alison was the real McCoy.”

  “Satanism?”

  He shook his head. “Satan is simply a label of convenience. Mind you, if Jesus had come back a few hundred years later, and seen what had been done in his name—the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or even just a routine schism with heretics burning at the stake over a point of doctrine—he’d probably have given up on all religion then and there. The atheist formerly known as Christ. He might even have decided it would be best—or at least much easier—to corrupt and destroy the human race instead of wasting time trying to save it. You get the gods you deserve.”

  “You’re wandering from the point,” Gaynor said, determined the discussion was going to go somewhere, though she had no idea precisely where. It occurred to her that his outlook—she could not think of a better word—must have something to do with his paintings, or vice versa, but it didn’t seem to clarify anything. “What kind of a—what kind of a witch was Alison?”

  “She had the Gift,” Will explained. (She could hear the capital letter.) “The ability to do things … beyond the range of ordinary human capacity.” He did not appear to notice the doubt in Gaynor’s questioning gaze. “When the universe was created, something—alien—got into the works, a lump of matter from outside. They called it the Lodestone. A friend of ours had the theory that it might have been a whole different cosmos, imploded into this ball of concentrated matter, but … Well, anyhow, it distorted everything around it. Including people. Especially people. It affected their genetic makeup, creating a freak gene that they passed on even when the Stone itself was destroyed. A sort of gene for witchcraft.” He gave her a sudden dazzling and eminently normal smile. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. I just think you ought to know. In case anything happens that shouldn’t.”

  “Do you think something is going to happen?” asked Gaynor, mesmerized.

  “Maybe. I’d whistle up a demon if I could, just to stop this idiotic wedding.”

  “Idiotic?” She was bemused by his choice of adjective.

  “Can you think of a better word? Fern’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, probably as a gesture of rejection. That seems fairly idiotic to me.”

  “What is she supposed to be rejecting?”

  “The Gift,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Don’t you understand? Fern’s a witch, too.”

  Gaynor stopped abruptly for the second time, staring at him in a sudden violent uncertainty. They had walked quite a way and she was aware of the empty countryside all around them, the wind ruffling the grasses, the piping voice of an isolated bird. The wild loneliness of it filled her with an upsurge of panic that nudged her into anger. “If this is your idea of a joke—”

  And then normality intruded. The dog came out of nowhere, bounding up to them on noiseless paws, halting just in front of her. Its mouth was open in a grin full of teeth and its tongue lolled. Will bent down to pat its muzzle but the yellow-opal eyes were fixed on Gaynor. The man followed briskly on its heels. He, too, gave the uncanny impression of appearing from nowhere. But this was normality, or so Gaynor assured herself. A man and his dog, walking on the moors. The dog was friendly, the man, dressed like a tramp, at least unequivocally human. Will evidently knew them.

  “This is Ragginbone,” he told Gaynor. The man, not the dog. And: “This is Gaynor Mobberley. She’s a close friend of Fern’s.” A firm handclasp, bright eyes scanning her face. He looked very old, she thought, or perhaps not so much old as aged, reminding her of an oak chest her mother had inherited recently from an antique relative. The wood was scored and blackened but tough, unyielding, halfway to carbonization. The man’s face seemed to have been carved in a similar wood, a long time ago, scratched with a thousand lines that melted into mobility when he smiled at her. His scarecrow hair was faded to a brindled straw but his brows were still dark and strong, crooked above the bright eyes that shone with a light that was not quite laughter but something deeper and more solemn. She wondered about his name (a sobriquet? a nickname?) but was too polite to ask.

  “And Lougarry.” Will indicated the dog. A shaggy animal without a collar who looked part Alsatian and all wolf. But Gaynor had grown up with dogs and was not particularly deterred. She extended her hand and the dog sniffed briefly, apparently more out of courtesy than curiosity.

  “And how is Fernanda?” asked the man called Ragginbone.

  “Still resolved on matrimony,” said Will. “It’s making her very jumpy. She picked a fight with me last night, just to prove she was doing the right thing.”

  “She has to choose for herself,” said the old man. “Neither you nor I have the right to coerce her, or even advise”

  Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back toward Yarrowdale, following a different path that plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.

  “Was this where Alison drowned?” Gaynor said suddenly.

  “Yes an
d no,” said Will. “This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Farther down from here.”

  Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.

  Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.

  “You’ll stay around, won’t you?” Will said to him.

  “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “I know, but…”

  “Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?”

  “There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.” He appealed to Gaynor. “You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you?” She remembered her nightmare in front of the television and the owl dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. “It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.”

  “We’ll be here,” said Ragginbone.

  He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. “I suppose he’s a wizard?” Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.

  “Oh no,” said Will. “Not anymore.”

  * * *

  Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts, and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twenty-first-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualized something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with premarital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. “I’ve run out of stamps,” she announced. “I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.”