Highland Dragon Master Page 6

  She opened her hand and turned it over, letting the men all see her palm. Transforming had healed her palm of the scrapes from her final desperate struggle with the wheel, and neither cross nor beads had left any mark.

  The crew looked with the gravity of men buying horses or weighing accounts. Sence was the first to nod.

  “Are you relations?” asked Franz. “If you’re both…if this is blood.”

  “Lord, no!” said Erik, quickly enough that Toinette lifted her eyebrows, wondering if he feared contaminating the MacAlasdair name by association with her. “Or only distant ones if we are. More than third cousins, likely.”

  “I don’t know who my father was,” Toinette added briskly. If the truth was to come out, it might as well all come out—or almost all. “What I heard of him doesn’t resemble any of Erik’s kin. So. Now we all know. And we’re all here.”

  “That,” said Marcus with a sigh, “we are indeed.”

  “Wherever that may be,” said John.

  All of them turned to Erik, who hesitated and shrugged. “This might be the island I was seeking.” He looked up at the stars, frowning, then shook his head. “I believe it is the right place, but I can’t read the sky as well as you can. My map…was with the rest of my belongings,” he added, looking back over his shoulder at the bulk of the landed ship.

  “We’ll salvage tomorrow. The light’ll be better then. No need to go in with torches and set it all on fire,” Marcus said.

  Wordlessly, the men moved to open a place for Toinette and Erik. The gesture went further toward calming Toinette than speech ever would have, and Raoul helped by handing over a small tin box. “We did get out a little of the food.”

  It was dried bread and salt beef, with a skin of warm wine going around for drink, but Toinette relished it. So did Erik, by his expression and the way he ate. Usually the size of prey they took in dragon form would have kept them full for a while, but occasionally snatched fish hadn’t been nearly enough fuel for the effort Toinette had put in that day. Her muscles were already making their objections known.

  “It’s too dark to build any shelters,” Marcus said. “But we’ve all slept rough before, and it’s not likely to rain again.” Indeed, the sky above them was clear enough to count every star, and the wind blew warmly from the east.

  “Any creatures out yonder?” Erik waved a hand to the dark bulk of the forest.

  “None that we’ve seen or heard, save birds. It’s likely our fire will scare most beasts away. All the same, we’ll keep watch. There’s enough of us that no man will have to lose more than an hour or two of sleep,” Marcus replied.

  “Nor do we have to be up at dawn,” Toinette put in. She stretched her feet out toward the fire, enjoying the heat on her damp boots. When dragon shape recognized her clothing as part of her, the garments stayed in the same condition from one human moment to the next: wonderful for avoiding further damage, but it did very little toward drying out wet clothes. “Well, I don’t mind taking the midnight shift, if it’s not claimed. I’m a few hours ahead of you men as it is.”

  “Oh,” said Franz. “John’s taking that. We’ve given them all out.”

  “Didn’t know when you’d wake up, did we? And anyhow, the two of you have exerted yourself far more than the rest of us did today. Best that you get a full night of it. We’ll work out more arrangements come the morning.” Marcus gave her a quick smile. He might have intended it to be reassuring, or apologetic, or both.

  There were even odds of him being sincere about the reasons. Even if those weren’t all the reasons, the men had planned the watches before Toinette had given her explanation and proved that she wasn’t in league with Satan, at least so far as rosaries could determine. It was important to keep such things in mind, particularly when she was in a melancholy humor to begin with.

  She made herself give her normal smile, breezy and matter-of-fact. “I’ll never say no to an extra night of sleep, Marcus. You know that.”

  * * *

  They let the fire burn. The man keeping watch would guard it too, and they needed a balance to the cold sand beneath them.

  After the planning, the conversation turned desultory, with long pauses that grew longer. It was too late and everyone was too tired to talk of the men they’d lost or the uncertainty of their future, but anything else would have been hideously incongruous. A few at a time, the men lay down and sought the release of sleep.

  In time, only Sence, Erik, and Toinette were left sitting at the fire, all three of them silent. Unfamiliar night birds called in the forest behind them. The stars were quiet overhead. Taken out of context, the scene might have been a very peaceful one.

  “Have you enough wood?” Erik asked.

  Sence jerked his chin at a pile off in the shadows. “We gathered it earlier. Should last until morning, or near enough.”

  “Good,” Erik said. “Then I’m off as well. Wake me if there’s need.”

  He lay down on the sand. Even with the sleep he’d gotten earlier and his less-than-comfortable bedding, fatigue soon stole over his body, weighing down bones and eyelids alike. Sleep itself didn’t come for a while, though: not until he heard Toinette’s voice muttering her own good night, and felt the disruption in the breeze as she stretched herself out on the land. She lay beside him, though several feet away, and he heard her slow, steady breathing.

  If she was asleep, she’d been quick about it. If not, she feigned well. Either way, the sound sent Erik off too, pulling him down into slumber as into the sea itself.

  Nine

  Daylight, food, and a full night of sleep worked no miracles. They were still stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere, and three good men were still dead. Toinette couldn’t exactly be cheerful under those circumstances, certainly not less than a day afterward. After eating, she did feel that she could see the world without a hazy veil across it and move about without her limbs weighing twice what they should have. That would suffice.

  What she could see of the island by day was a strip of sandy beach that curved around in a crescent shape. Cliffs rose stark, gray, and forbidding a half mile or so up the shore, and trees, mostly pines and birches, grew atop them. The rocks on the beach were smooth, well worn by the water. The form of the ship at rest might have been just another one, larger and oddly shaped.

  “We should salvage what we can from the Hawk,” Toinette said after the mostly silent meal. “It’ll be easier to repair the less we have aboard, and we’ll want food and bedding close to hand, if there’s any undamaged. And”—she glanced toward the mast—“we’ll want to give Gervase and Yakob a decent burial.”

  Heads around the fire nodded, Sence’s particularly strongly at the last statement.

  Erik added, as if it was a commonplace suggestion, “The two of us could get the cargo off in our other forms, aye? At least once we’ve got it onto the deck—pluck it off while we’re in the water, and swim it over.”

  “I expect so,” said Toinette slowly, watching the faces of her men.

  “At that,” Marcus said, “you could overfly the island. It’d be well to know how the rest of the land lies, and a sight easier than getting up those cliffs.” He waved a hand in their direction. “We’ll see about making shelters in the meantime. There were some chunks of driftwood too large to burn, and I thought I saw a few likely rocks further up the beach.”

  “There’s sense in that,” Toinette replied.

  Marcus rolled his eyes at her. “Sound a bit less startled when you say so, Captain, if you would?”

  It was the first joke he’d made to her since the storm. She laughed, and the air took the sound strangely—but perhaps any air would have seemed to do so just then. “Humility is a virtue, haven’t you heard?”

  “I’ve enough virtue as it is. Best not to overdo it.”

  This time, the men’s laughter joined Toinette’s. The m
orning got a bit better. There was no need to explain that she’d sounded startled not by Marcus’s idea but because he’d been so willing to voice it.

  “Best begin, then,” she said. “Erik?”

  “As my lady commands.”

  “Whoever your lady is,” Toinette said, “I suspect she has considerably less sand in her boots.”

  They went off a little way to transform, as much to spare the men the sight as to avoid putting the fire out. Still Toinette thought that some of the crew were watching, Marcus and Samuel most notably among them.

  Between her arrival at Castle MacAlasdair and the storm the previous day, she’d never transformed in front of anyone but other dragon-blooded. In the storm she’d had no time to think. She felt naked now, only mere nudity had never bothered her so much.

  Stop being a simpering maiden, she told herself. Pretend they’re not around.

  Toinette closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. Briefly she feared that awkwardness would hinder her change, but it went as swiftly and smoothly as ever. Dragon form had always come easily to her—too easily in her youth.

  As soon as the change was stable, she leapt into the air, circling upward. The air currents were unfamiliar and, she soon learned, treacherous. She found herself frantically beating her wings for altitude one minute, while in the next, a headwind would force her backward. Damnably odd weather, though who knew what normal was like in this part of the world?

  She wouldn’t have wanted to try to fly out, even if there hadn’t been the men to consider. It was as much as she could do to get enough height for a view of the island.

  It spread out wider after the cliffs. The rough crescent stayed the same over all, but they’d certainly landed on the inner edge. The rest was a dark mass of forest. Occasionally, birds flew up above it—ravens and gulls, mostly, from what Toinette could see—but the trees were too dense for her to make out more life. They were too dense for her to try landing there too.

  To her side, the sound of vast wings alerted her to Erik’s presence. She turned and saw him there, looking much as she remembered him from their youth: sky-blue, with eyes that glowed a bit like Saint Elmo’s fire as it normally appeared, and more square than sinuous. With her black scales nearby, as Moiread had observed once, they put an audience in mind of a summer thunderstorm.

  He seemed to be having as much trouble staying aloft as she did, and showed no more inclination to land. Toinette wasn’t mean enough to find that satisfying, but she would admit that she would have felt worse if the wind hadn’t been giving him any trouble.

  Drifting down toward the beach again, she did see that one end wound up the cliffs and into the forest. It wasn’t much of a path, but it would be better than trying to climb the cliffs themselves, and they would likely need to go up there. Repairing the Hawk would take more than driftwood; also, there might be food that wasn’t fish. In dragon form, Toinette didn’t see the appeal of vegetation, but she knew humans needed it.

  She landed on the sand with a lightness that pleased her: the satisfaction of knowing her body still worked well, after she’d put it through a trial or five. The small pleasure sustained her through the next few minutes, when she shifted and walked up to rejoin the men. They were rising from around the fire and forming small groups under Marcus’s direction. Past them, the Hawk sat dark in the water, maimed and still. Toinette tried not to hear her say You failed.

  “We’ll retrieve the bodies first,” she said, “then the supplies.”

  * * *

  “What are the usual rites? When someone dies at sea, that is?”

  “You pick the best ways to make conversation.”

  Erik shrugged. “I just didn’t know if I should be doing something. War—” He spread his hands. “When we had time and a priest, we might have buried the men where they lay, or taken them home if they were noble.”

  Less than a hundred years back, it would have been mos Teutonicus for a good many noblemen: boiling the flesh off the bones, as a skeleton packed lighter and cleaner than a whole body. Cathal had told stories about seeing such things on Crusade, but one of the last few popes had forbidden the practice before Erik had been to war.

  “Over the side for us, generally, and pay for masses later,” said Toinette. “You can’t keep a dead body on a ship. We’ve got enough land for burial here, but…” She shrugged. “No priest. Hard luck for them, but they won’t be the first, and if they go to Purgatory for it, they’ll have company enough.”

  “Aye,” said Erik, “right you are.”

  In the plague years, thousands had gone to Saint Peter unshriven and buried without rites, many without even their own plot to lie in. They’d died too fast for the priests—who’d been dying themselves. God would hopefully understand. Granted, God had presumably sent the plague in the first place, but Erik was no priest and that was not a road he wanted to go too far down.

  Morbid thoughts weighed on a man’s mind. As he followed Toinette up the Hawk’s gangplank, Erik thought it took more effort than it should have, as though the island was trying to tug him back down and he had to fight it with every step.

  Don’t make a fuss, lad, he told himself. You’re weary, that’s all, and distressed.

  The sight that met his eyes when he reached the deck hardly eased his mind. Gervase, or what was left of him, lay crushed under the broken mast. One arm was flung up and out to the side, as though he could have shielded himself. He had no face any longer, but the gold earring shone up from the red mess on the deck.

  “Holy Mary, aid us,” said Toinette. She shook her head and closed her eyes.

  Erik put a hand on her arm. “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I know he’d been with you a long time.”

  “Years, yes,” she said, and neither of them bothered specifying long for a mortal. Toinette spoke hoarsely. “They say worse things happen at sea. This is one of them.”

  “That it is, lass.”

  Toinette drew her thumb and forefinger across her closed eyelids, tracing the copper fans of her lashes before pinching the bridge of her nose. “We can make shrouds out of the sailcloth. There’s enough left whole, and spare below for getting back.”

  Separating cloth from mast was a tiresome, sweaty business, and a grim one as well, as it meant working around Gervase’s body. Both Toinette and Erik were silent while they worked, and then while they carefully wrapped the shroud. Anything else would have seemed an affront to the dead man.

  The cloth was almost an affront itself: damp, grimy, and clumsily cut at the edges, as belt daggers were not made for that sort of work. It was thick enough that the off-white didn’t turn red immediately, for which, Erik thought, God be praised.

  Toinette worked quickly, with steady hands and set lips. Once Erik opened his mouth to say that she didn’t need to do this, that she could go back to shore and rest, but he stopped himself. The girl he’d known would have blackened his eye for such a suggestion. The woman had likely learned better manners, but even if she accepted, Erik doubted she’d do so happily.

  Instead, when they’d tucked in every fold that they could, he straightened up and asked, “Would you rather take him back while I go below and get Yakob, or the other way ’round? I don’t think there’s any need for both of us.”

  “No,” Toinette said slowly. “Best for one of us to stay up here while the other’s below. If the ship’s taken more damage than we can see from here, and the deck collapses, whoever’s below will want someone close at hand.”

  “Ah,” said Erik, considering that prospect. “We could each likely scream loud enough to be heard from shore, but I take your point. Above or below, then?”

  “I’ll wait here,” said Toinette.

  As Erik descended into the hold, he saw her clasp her hands behind her back and stare out across the water.

  Ten

  “Grant this mercy, O Lord, we beseec
h Thee, to Thy servant departed,” Marcus spoke in clumsy Latin, Erik having told him the words only minutes before. For a burial, the rite was rather a farce. Whatever God thought about the dragon-blooded, the men would have found it unsettling if one of them had spoken the prayers, but they were the only ones who knew Latin.

  The compromise was undignified. Then again, there was seldom dignity in death.

  Erik stood and listened as Marcus continued. “That he may not receive in punishment the requital of his deeds who in desire did keep Thy will, and as the true faith here united him to the company of the faithful, so may Thy mercy unite him above to the choirs of angels. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  In dragon form, Toinette and Erik had dug the holes: simple work enough. The men filled them in though, as seemed more proper, and set a crude driftwood cross atop each of the graves.

  Sence, of all the men, wept openly: quiet, but without shame. The others hung their heads, blinked tears away with some pretense of disguise, or simply stared in silent grief. Only some had known the dead men well, but their deaths were a reminder to all of what had passed—and the uncertainty in which they all now found themselves.

  Toinette stared straight ahead, her arms folded under her breasts. She’d taken her blue gown out of the ship and donned it before the burial. It was damp, but whole and free of sand. She’d also brushed her hair and bound it severely back with string. Bare of that softening influence, her face was stark, her lips a knife edge. The angles of her shoulders and elbows and jaw all spoke of pain.

  Standing barely inches from her, Erik longed to offer her comfort, but dared not even touch her arm as he’d done on the Hawk. Even if she’d welcome the contact at another time, it might do more harm than good in front of her crew.