Highland Dragon Master Read online

  “How very loyal of you.”

  As it had always done, her gaze grew remote when speaking of such matters, and the humor in her voice was lofty: These affairs have so little to interest me. When Erik was fifteen, he’d blushed and stammered and grown angry. When he was eighteen, he’d blushed and stammered for different reasons, and the anger had taken a distant place.

  Toinette had been his first kiss. He’d never asked, but he was dead certain he hadn’t been hers.

  Older, he drank wine and composed an answer. “There’s not so much fighting these days. We’re preparing for David to return. I’ve been told I can be most helpful in this manner.” When Toinette’s dark eyes didn’t waver, he added, “And I’d like a reason to be away just now.”

  War grew weary for most men. For the dragon-blooded, it could be dangerous. Too much death without a respite could lead to bloodlust, or to enough distance from mortals that their lives became playthings. Artair MacAlasdair was very careful about such tendencies in his kin, even in the cadet branches.

  “I’d imagine many people would,” said Toinette. “For all there are fewer men about, we’ll likely find a crew easily enough. But first,” she added, raising a slim sun-browned hand, “let us talk payment.”

  Two

  “And half the treasure,” said Toinette, pulling off her second boot and propping her feet up on the end of the bed.

  “If treasure there be.” Marcus, already as horizontal as it was possible for a man to be, gave her a skeptical look from the depths of his pillow. “He’s chasing legends. Will you start too?”

  “I am a legend.”

  “Captaining one merchant ship doesn’t make you an Amazon.”

  “A girl can dream.” Toinette didn’t correct him. While Marcus knew a great deal about her, his knowledge did not extend to her other form, and she was content to leave it that way. “Besides, that’s why I’m having him pay in advance, and pay well too. I’ve not gone soft in the head just because we made land.”

  “Oh, I was just crediting it to old age.”

  “Bear in mind,” Toinette said, giving him a baleful look, “that you sleep sounder than I do, young man.”

  Marcus laughed. “You’d not kill me. What other man would you trust to share a bed and not to turn you out for better company half the nights?”

  Desire, whether for men or women, had never burdened Marcus overmuch. If he’d been a more faithful man, or a less adventurous one, he would have made an excellent priest—which would have been a great loss to Toinette, as he was a damned good first mate. “And I suppose most of them would snore worse than you do, at that. Smell worse, almost definitely.”

  “I can live, then?”

  “Oh, for now. It’s late, and I’d as soon not go to the trouble of cleaning your blood off the mattress. And innkeepers make an unholy fuss about corpses in their rooms.”

  Toinette stretched herself out, luxuriating in the length of the bed and the softness of the straw mattress. She’d chosen shipboard life freely and had yet to regret it, but all the same, it was lovely to have her back truly straight for a night or two. She wiggled her toes.

  “Speaking of better company,” said Marcus, “will you be needing the room to yourself while we’re here?”

  “Doubtful.”

  On the occasion that Toinette took a lover, she generally either went back to the man’s accommodations, hired a room herself, or—at times—found a stable loft or similar convenience for an hour’s privacy. When none of those options presented themselves, Marcus took himself out to find his own amusements for a while. It was never very long. The last man Toinette had let stay afterward had been Jehan. After he’d died, it had seemed a slight to his memory for others to remain.

  Marcus was different. Wherever Jehan was, Toinette was sure he understood.

  “Ill-favored city, is it?” Marcus asked.

  “When I was young, it might have seemed otherwise. Now?” She shrugged. “The more men I’ve had in my bed, the more they all seem the same—and the less worth the trouble of getting them there.”

  That might have been true after ten years; it was certainly true after more than a century. The exception who came to mind… Well, he was paying her, and they’d be on a ship full of her men for months. Best not to even think about that one, much as she might like to.

  From the street outside came off-key singing: men drunk enough to take their chances in the darkness.

  “They left out a line there, I think,” Marcus observed.

  “D’you want to go out and correct them?”

  “I might, if they don’t stop soon.”

  “It always is a shock,” Toinette agreed, retrieving her share of the blankets, “how noisy cities are after the sea. Though the beds make up for it. And the food. I can’t say I’m looking forward to biscuit and fish again.”

  “You’re the one who took the man up on his offer. And how does he intend to find this island, come to that?”

  “He managed to get his hands on a map. He says it’s a long story. I’ll have it out of him by the third day at sea, I’ll wager—but meanwhile, I’ve seen the map, and it does look real. Besides, MacAlasdair’s not the sort to chase nursery tales without any solid sign. Never was.”

  Punctuating her sentence, she blew out the candle and settled down into the bed. Marcus, a foot away, was a comfortably warm presence. Even summer nights in Bordeaux almost never got very hot.

  His voice came out of the darkness, half drowned in a yawn. “How do you know this fellow, then?”

  “Oh,” said Toinette, her own voice slurred as her eyelids grew heavy. “Long time ago. You might say we grew up together.”

  In a way, she thought as she slid down under the waves of sleep, it was true. Only growing up meant more to the dragon-blooded than it did to mortals—and she, looking back, could never have said when it had happened to her. Adulthood had come in fits and starts, blood and pain and madness.

  Toinette supposed that much was common enough even for mortals.

  * * *

  Loch Arach had long been familiar to Erik. As great a distance as it was from the island that he called home, it was still close enough for frequent travel in dragon form. Lamorak MacAlasdair held the island with his brother’s backing, and both knew it. A year or two sometimes passed between visits, but never more.

  When Erik was fifteen, he’d gone to Artair MacAlasdair’s castle. To mortals, that had been the fostering common with most young men. For Erik, as for the others in his line, it had been more: his transformations had begun. Unlike the island, Loch Arach had room to keep changing and hunting a secret. Moreover, Castle MacAlasdair had rooms with magic woven into the walls that could hold a dragon if one’s nature broke free of control.

  However many branches the family had, the youth came to Loch Arach. Erik came to suspect that Artair was fond of the arrangement. He was as canny as he was old, and no stranger to the advantages of strengthening blood ties with a bit of mingling.

  Young Erik had welcomed the journey. He’d had a glorious few months at first: training both of his forms, playing games with his cousins, hunting in the forest, and swimming in the lake.

  Shortly after harvest, a small band of traders had come through. With them had come a girl.

  Erik still remembered his first look at her. She’d been thirteen and spider spindly, her hair a roughly cut shock of carrot-orange and her face all outthrust chin. Her clothing had been patched and too large; her hand had lingered near the dagger at her waist too long for any sort of courtesy. Standing in the tower room at Castle MacAlasdair, she’d watched the assembled MacAlasdairs with barely disguised skepticism.

  The girl was named Antoinette. She had no last name; Fitzdraca would do if one was needed. She was dragon-blooded. She would stay with them until she learned to control her abilities. They would treat her as
one of the family. Artair had explained those facts briefly, and to say that his tone had brooked no disagreement would have been untrue only in implying that any tone of his had ever allowed for argument about anything. Antoinette was staying. It was a fact, from that moment as unchangeable as the hills around them.

  Later Erik had discovered that Toinette had marched up to Artair, told him of her situation, and offered to demonstrate her powers. He and Cathal had speculated about whether she’d started by sticking her hand in the hearth fire just to get Artair’s attention. It had seemed like the sort of thing she’d do.

  Poor relations, especially illegitimate ones, were supposed to conduct themselves with a certain humble gratitude, and while Toinette had never seemed ungrateful, she’d been far from humble. From the first, she’d kept up with the MacAlasdairs, refusing to be left behind or to keep her questions to herself. Erik, fifteen and very conscious of his dignity as a young man, had thought more than once about throwing her into the loch. His own status as a guest had tied his hands, though, and he’d never managed to persuade Cathal to do it, not even when Toinette had won all of their pocket money at dice.

  He outdid her in hunting, in both forms, and he was far better with dogs and falcons. Those were his consolations.

  Over three years, he’d found out very little about her past. Her father had been a scholar calling himself Antonio. He’d not bothered marrying her mother, which explained some of Artair’s interest in her. Since the MacAlasdairs had settled Scotland, if not before, no man of their line had accidentally sired a child on a mortal woman. Toinette’s father, by inference, must have been only a generation or two removed from the Old Ones, the true and immortal dragons. Toinette didn’t talk about her mother.

  She’d grown up in London, not quite a child of the streets but not far from it either. At twelve, on the cusp of womanhood, she’d started changing in more ways than one. She’d managed to make it out to the countryside before her first full transformation, she said, and since Erik had never heard stories of a dragon rampaging in London, he was inclined to believe her.

  He’d never heard exactly what rumors she’d followed to find the MacAlasdairs. Toinette didn’t talk much about that either.

  Not that she’d been silent, by any means. As a girl, Toinette had been full of questions and opinions, songs and stories and challenges. At fourteen, she’d broken her arm trying to outdo the others in flight, and even the quick healing of their blood hadn’t spared her a week of miserable boredom. At fifteen, she’d taken to writing bad poetry. Erik and Cathal had found some and read it aloud, and Erik had gotten a water pitcher to the head for his pains.

  By the time he’d been eighteen and Toinette sixteen, she’d been tall and willowy, finally graceful in skirts. Her hair had grown. Braided about her head, it had looked to Erik like a flaming halo, though she’d never achieved any kind of sainthood.

  He’d more than reconciled himself to her company. Their fights had continued, but with an undertone that had left him with a spinning head and embarrassing dreams.

  Then Artair had sent her away. He’d been kind about it, letting her choose her path. She’d ended up leaving with the traders who’d brought her, with enough money to give her a good start regardless of her sex.

  “I could go to a convent, too,” she’d said as they’d sat behind the forester’s cottage on her last day at Loch Arach, enjoying an adolescent refuge for the final time. “But I couldn’t see myself among nuns.”

  Neither could Erik, but he didn’t consider it the better part of chivalry to say so. “I can’t see why you have to go in the first place,” he said. “To go back on hospitality after so many years—”

  Toinette had rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a fool if you can help it. You and Cathal are old enough to wed now. Any lord who’s thinking you over for his daughter will go sour on the whole idea if Artair has a ward around old enough to warm your beds. He cares more about land and arms than blood, so I’m a hindrance right now. Sensible man.”

  “Heartless, you mean,” Erik said, trying to pretend his face was red from outrage.

  “Hearts don’t do anyone much good. He’s been nicer than I’d a right to expect. Besides”—she shrugged—“it’s about time I saw more of the world. But before I go—”

  She’d leaned forward, awkwardly since they were both sitting, grasped his shoulders, and pressed her open mouth to his.

  Girls hadn’t been rare in Loch Arach, but Erik had never gotten the nerve to approach one. They were servants, or villagers, and he was a guest at the castle. He’d no wish to risk Artair’s wrath. He’d looked, and dreamed, and thought things might be different when he went home.

  At the touch of Toinette’s lips, his body had lit up with internal flame. He’d kissed her back clumsily but intensely, their tongues sliding against each other, and wound his fingers into the red silk of her hair. He was leaning toward her, trying to figure out how to get closer without falling over on her, when a voice called her name from a short distance away: Agnes, Cathal’s older sister.

  Instantly they broke apart, and Toinette sprang to her feet. “I’ll be there directly!”

  Erik—not inclined to stand up just then and unsure he’d be able to any time before sunset—had stared up at her. “What… Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted to know,” she’d said, “if it’d be better now I’m older. And it was. Thank you.”

  Then, skirts whirling as she turned, she’d left him to his confusion and lust.

  Three

  Crew vanished at every port. Some found new ships, some tired of life at sea and headed off to seek a farm, and a few met a more final end, whether by tavern fights or spoiled food. Toinette was only thankful to be seeing fewer deaths from the plague.

  Erik’s mission meant losing more than usual. Men who’d been quite content to sail from France to Muscovy, or London to Spain, heard mysterious island west of England and shook their heads. Sailing was dangerous enough on the routes men knew practically by heart. They sailed on respectable merchant ships, not as pirates or explorers. The whole venture sounded foolhardy.

  Knowing that very well, Toinette didn’t bother trying to convince them. It wouldn’t have done any good, and she had a conscience, shriveled and shrunken though it might be. Risking her life and those of willing men was as far as she would go.

  Thus she drew more heavily than usual from the taverns. The Hawk would sail decently with ten men. Counting herself and Marcus, that left eight. Erik would likely be useful if they met with pirates, but she didn’t want to count on him for running up the sail or manning the wheel.

  “And you don’t have to come,” she told Marcus as she made her plans, the notion having occurred to her while she slept. “I’ll not hold it against you.”

  He made a pfah sound through his beard. “And will I live forever if I stay?”

  “I don’t know,” said Toinette. “Make friends with an alchemist, and you might manage it yet.”

  “I’ll take my chances. If this island does exist, I want to see it. If it doesn’t… Well, you’re a woman of some sense. I’ll wager you’ll turn back before we run through our supplies.”

  “That I will,” said Toinette. They both knew that the matter wasn’t so simple. Storms and calms interfered with a captain’s best will, often to the cost of lives.

  But Marcus knew that, and he was a grown man. Toinette made certain that the rest of the men she hired knew it too. Five were from her old crew, loyal enough to stay with her no matter how dubious the voyage, or young and adventurous enough to welcome the risk for its own sake.

  Of the other three, Raoul was a branded poacher, Sence a dark and morose man who spoke little, and Emrich a scarecrow who looked around constantly and sat with his back to the wall at all times. Toinette was doubtful of their company, but they all spoke knowledgeably about their time on ships. If nothing else, the
y were reasonably young, strong of back, and whole of body.

  Taking no chances, she had a shipbuilder come aboard and tour the Hawk, keeping an eye out for any gaps in the boards or unsoundness in the wood.

  She didn’t think of speaking again to Erik. The preparation was hers to handle. She’d taken passengers before. When she was ready, she would send a message to his inn. Until then, she had no time for nostalgia.

  * * *

  “’Ware the barrel, there!” Toinette shouted as Erik approached the Hawk.

  He sidestepped quickly out of the way as two men carried an immense tun up to the ship’s gangplank. Their fellows were rolling or lifting barrels of a similar size, as well as vast boxes and sacks. The docks near the ship were as busy as an anthill on a sunny day.

  Toinette took her sharp eyes off the activity to walk down and meet him. “Rather chafes to know the two of us could have all of this done in an afternoon,” she said.

  “We could put our shoulders to the wheel even in this form. It’d make your reputation,” Erik joked, looking at her. She wore a light-blue gown of thin wool with green and white embroidery, and her hair was pulled simply back into a white net. There was nothing ornate about her, but she looked every inch the well-to-do merchant’s widow, and while she was tall and tanned, nobody seeing her would have credited her strength.

  Toinette laughed. Her eyes thinned a trifle, though, and there was sharpness in her voice when she first spoke. “I don’t doubt it. That’s the problem.” The mood lifted, or seemed to, and she gave him a freer smile. “Come for inspection?”

  “Gawking, you might say. I don’t know what should be going aboard.”

  “Biscuits, wine, cheese, salted pork, turnips, and peas, enough for three months.” Toinette gave him a flat look. “If we’ve not found the place when we’re six weeks out, we’re turning back, and I’ll hear no argument on it. Understood?”

  “Completely.”

  “Good.” She turned back to look at the ship. “Also fishing nets and lines, soap and brushes for the ship, sailcloth and wood for repairs, which God willing we won’t need to make at sea. Medicines.”