Dragonswood Read online

  Dragonswood

  Dragonswood

  BY Janet Lee Carey

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

  Dial Books

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. • Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U. S. A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi –110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Janet Lee Carey

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility

  for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Designed by Jennifer Kelly

  Text set in Stempel Garamond

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carey, Janet Lee.

  Dragonswood / by Janet Lee Carey.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In AD 1192 on Wilde Island, Tess, the daughter of a cruel blacksmith, is accused of witchcraft and must flee, but when she meets a handsome and enigmatic warden of Dragonswood who offers her shelter, she does not realize that he too harbors a secret that may finally bring about peace among the races of dragon, human, and fairy.

  EISBN: 9781101559680

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. British Isles—History—12th century—Fiction.

  4. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C2125Ds 2012

  [Fic]—dc23 2011021638

  TO MY SISTER OF THE ROAD,

  DANA PANDEY.

  WE DIDN’T RUN AWAY DISGUISED AS

  LEPERS, BUT WE HITCHHIKED EVERYWHERE TOGETHER,

  WHICH WAS PERILOUS ENOUGH. THANKS FOR

  WATCHING OUT FOR ME IN OUR TRAVELS.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1: WITCH HUNT

  PART 2: THE GREEN MAN

  PART 3: FEY FOLK AND FOUL

  PART 4: HUMAN, DRAGON, AND FAIRY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Fire, fire flaming bright,

  Golden in the autumn night,

  Warn me with your eldritch sight,

  What danger comes, and what delight.

  Prologue

  I AM SEVEN years old. My father takes me to a witch burning. He runs in close enough to throw sticks in the pyre. The fire roars. The woman, Jane Fine, screams, flames snaking up her gown. Loud cracks of wood or bone. I am crying, choking on the smoke, the burning flesh. Too late Grandfather forces his way in, picks me up, and races back through the mob. I knew Jane Fine. She made pretty candles with flower petals pressed into the sides. They said Jane’s candles blazed with hellfire; that she danced with Satan in Dragonswood. Grandfather holds me close. I weep in his strong arms, bury my head in his cloak. Jane is consumed by fire.

  I AM TWELVE years old. I run away, after my father breaks my arm. I creep into Dragonswood, though it is against the law to go there. I have come here before to escape my life, to scale a pine tree and feel the wind. This night I cannot climb; my broken arm is still in a sling. Brilliant shining specks swirl deep in the wood, will-o’-the-wisps fly ahead—tiny fairies, cousins to the ones that are human-sized. I laugh, chasing them. I am filled with a deep longing I have no words for. They dance in magical patterns as I run. In this moment I am free from my raging father, from my mother, who can’t protect either one of us from his anger, from my fettered life in town. I am wild as the fey.

  I am laughing. I am crying. The fiery wisps vanish.

  I AM SEVENTEEN years old. The sexton is burning a leaf pile in the graveyard. We have come to bury my baby brother, Adam. There are six other graves here, all my baby sisters from years past. My eyes are swollen from crying. I am holding my mother’s hand. I am her only living child. With her other hand, my mother rubs my back. Across the tiny grave my father stands, head down, his first and only son gone to earth. I glare at the midwife whose useless herbs did not save my brother.

  Sparks whirl up from the burning leaves. The firelight draws me in. I grow still as still. I cannot feel my mother’s hand. The churchyard fades. All is flame. I know I am being pulled into a fire-sight. I have had visions before. When they come I am transfixed and I cannot look away. In the pulsing blaze I see a man swinging a sword. His body shimmers, green in the flames. I cannot make out his face, all dark shadow in the fire. Light flashes from his sword, cutting bright across my face and chest. I feel the blade’s icy light.

  PART ONE

  Witch Hunt

  Chapter One

  Wilde Island, AD 1192

  I SEE VISIONS in the fire sometimes, images of the past or what is yet to come. The fire-sight does not lie. But I did not see the witch hunter who would ride in to scour our town of sin, so I did not know to run.

  The whole of Wilde Island had been in an uproar all summer. King Kadmi Pendragon died in June. His eldest son and heir was away on crusade. A king’s regent, Lord Sackmoore, ruled until his return. In July, thieves crept into Pendragon Castle and stole the royal treasure: crown, scepter, jewels, and all. For the rest of that summer, the king’s younger son and his knights searched everywhere for the treasure. The army swarmed in and tore up our town. But it was the one who rode in next, the one we welcomed with open arms, who did us the most harm.

  I start my story the day the witch hunter came. It was a misty September morn a week after we buried my baby brother, Adam. I’d been shut away in mourning. Hunger, lack of market money, and the need to make soup for our table drove me out. Basket in hand, I left town with my friends to gather wild onions. Meg wore her newly woven cloak, a russet red that matched her hair. Poppy bedecked her blond braids with fleabane flowers.

  My empty stomach was coiled tight as a snake. “Do you think we’ll find enough onions for soup?” Meg and Poppy didn’t go without, but my family had nothing to eat that morning, and free food was hard to come by.

  “I saw a good patch. Plenty growing there,” Poppy said. She looped her arm through mine. “You should let me help you with that.” She peered at my black eye—a gift from my father, the blacksmith.

  “I’m all right.”

  Meg and I were pretty enough, but Poppy struck men dumb. They saw her soft curving shape, her milky skin and honeyed hair. I saw the friend who’d played fairy princess with me when we were small, who’d tried to pull my first wiggling tooth out with a string.

  The trees in Dragonswood rustled in the wind along the boundary wall. Mist blew up from the sea and swirled at our feet like witch’s hair. I looked to the pines, longing to scale one.

  “When’s the wedding, Tess?” Meg said.

  “What wedding?”

  “You’re to marry Master Percival soon,” Meg reminded me.

  “Never.”

  “You’re seventeen. If not Master Percival, it will be someone else.”

  I’d had other suitors; none were rich enough to please my father until this latest one. He wanted to rope me to an older man with money, one who kept his wife in the same fashion he’d kept his own
. Master Percival had grown children. He’d outlived three wives already. I’d seen their bruised faces when I’d met them at the town well. The welts on their arms just like mine and Mother’s.

  “Wedlock is a hangman’s noose,” I said.

  “Tess!” Meg gasped.

  Poppy tugged my brown hair and giggled.

  “Wedlock—a telling word; women are locked in, the husband keeps the key.” I spun around. “Give me a man who never beats his wife or child, who lets his wife ride out when she likes, who buys her ink that she might draw or write, books that she might read, who walks beside her, not before her, and does not make her empty his piss pot.” Who does not mind that she slips into Dragonswood to see the great old dragons and glimpse the fairy folk, I thought, but did not say. “A man who listens when she speaks and enjoys her conversation, and I will marry.”

  Poppy hooted.

  Meg laughed enough to shake her curls. “You ask for the stars! Why not add that he’s young and tall, well-muscled, with straight teeth, a deep laugh, and a dimple on his cheek.”

  “That too.” I nodded appreciatively.

  Meg went on, “Pale-skinned—”

  “No, sun-darkened,” I said.

  Poppy bowed to me. “Beautiful Princess Tess, will you marry me?”

  I liked that she called me beautiful despite my black eye and my left ear that Father had boxed so many times the skin was puckered like a cauliflower. I was almost completely deaf on that side.

  “My lady,” I said, putting out my hand. We dropped our baskets and danced.

  “You’ll both end up as nuns,” Meg warned, but she danced with us till we were all out of breath. A ray of sun fell across the road. We’d been friends all our lives. I did not know then how much I would hurt them both, and how soon.

  “So you see, I’ll never marry.”

  “You have no romance in your heart.” Meg was disappointed. She was lucky to have wed Tom Weaver when she was fourteen. Tom was a youth with little means who lived with his mother and his father, Old Weaver. He’d never beaten Meg or their daughter, Alice, to my knowledge. Tom was the exception.

  I touched my puffy eye as we walked on. So many women in town wore the dull, downtrodden look that went with cuts, bruises, and broken bones. Ah, I’d noticed the tipped heads and hunched shoulders. I recognized the same look in my mother’s pinched face, and in my own after Father broke my arm.

  Poppy glanced at Meg. “Tess thinks to live alone and make a living scribing or with her artwork.”

  “Poppy! That was between you and me.” I’d not told Meg, knowing what she’d say.

  Meg cocked a brow. “Men paint and scribe for a living, not women.” Mother had said the same, though Grandfather had taught me how to draw, write, and keep sums, and I’d kept accounts for Father’s blacksmith shop for years. My sums were tidy, our finances were not. Mother’s midwife drained our purse. Father drank up what was left. Thus our outing for this day’s onions.

  Meg went on. “A young woman does not keep to herself and earn her own way. Do you want to end up burned for a witch like Jane Fine?”

  “She sold artful candles, Meg. I draw.”

  “What’s the difference? Living by your lonesome without a man to protect you? They’ll call you a witch and burn you.”

  “Jane Fine stole into Dragonswood and danced with Satan there,” Poppy reminded. “Tess would never do that.”

  “She made us go over the boundary wall once,” Meg argued.

  “To gather blackberries,” I said. “What’s the harm of that? No one saw us go in.”

  “Are you sure?” We’d seen my father in Dragonswood with Tidas Leech that day. They’d broken the law, slinking into the king’s protected lands to hunt deer. But we’d hidden from them.

  “Here,” Poppy said. We waded through the long wet grass to the onion patch she’d spied earlier. My mouth watered. I pulled two and ate them. I couldn’t help it. After that I gathered in earnest for my family’s table. The patch was just beside the stone wall. The evergreens whispered over us, casting a filigree of shadows on the ground. Poppy was wrong. I’d crept in many nights. Not to dance with Satan, never that, but to run, climb the trees, listen to the singing wind, see the moonlit world from up on high.

  I loved the sanctuary that Queen Rosalind Pendragon and King Kye made long ago. They’d restored the heart of Wilde Island, once home to dragons and fey alike, by giving them their own reserve. My place too.

  Trying to keep away from Dragonswood only increased my longing. I could barely breathe in our house above the shop. At night I’d pace in my upstairs room with pricking skin, leaden lungs, until it was dark enough to flee. Then out my window, down the oak tree, I’d loose myself from town, racing hard till I reached the sanctuary. Not even my closest friends seemed compelled to climb the boundary wall as I did night after night to run and run and run. Times I felt I must go in or die. And when I was away from it, I drew what I’d seen there in the moonlight: dragons, deer, foxes, owls, the shining will-o’-the-wisps, and the fey folk I’d been lucky enough to glimpse.

  Meg hummed a tune. I dug up another onion, green as dragon scales. Last week I’d spied a mighty dragon winging over the moonlit wood. A long, jagged scar traced down his neck. He didn’t see me hiding in the branches when he wheeled down, scoring Harrow River with his fire. The river, dark blue in twilight, glittered like spilled gold with his flame.

  “Tess,” Meg teased. “Where have you gone?”

  “She’s always dreaming,” Poppy said.

  Horse hooves pounded down the road. “Hush. Someone is coming.”

  Knights rounded the bend. Riding along in their splendid livery, two men blew their trumpets. The herald behind them called, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Come all ye citizens of Harrowton and gather in the town square!”

  Meg jumped up. “Let’s go.”

  I gripped my basket. “If I don’t have enough onions for supper, I’ll be beaten for it.”

  “We’ll come back later, Tess,” Poppy said. “You can’t refuse a royal summons.”

  “They already ransacked our town for the missing treasure.”

  Poppy stood. “Maybe they’ve come to say it’s found. Or announce Prince Arden’s come home from the crusades at last.”

  “To be crowned our new Wilde Island king,” Meg added.

  A royal summons was rare enough. Knights had to ride south along Kingsway Road, tracing the edge of Dragonswood down the coast from Pendragon Castle fifty miles to the north down to our town of Harrowton, at the southernmost tip of the reserve. Ah, and they’d have to ride hundreds of miles south after that to spread their news, for our isle is long and slender as a man’s riding boot, stretching four hundred miles top to toe.

  “Well?” Poppy said.

  I plucked a handful of buttercups, washed my filthy hands in the wet grass, stood. If Prince Arden was home, I didn’t want to miss the news. As we raced back down the road, Saint Cuthbert’s bells clanged so folk as far off as Old Weaver’s shop on the edge of town would hear the summons.

  Townsfolk poured from shops and cottages. We joined the people in the northern half of town heading for the market square, crossing the stone bridge over the Harrow River that split our town in two. Halfway across the bridge, I spied a tall young man standing on the far side at the water’s edge. Hands on hips, he stared past the coming crowd and back down the road at the approaching cavalcade. Mist rising from the river swathed the man in pearly light. I knew the folk in Harrowton. I did not know him.

  “Come on, Tess.” Meg tugged my hand. My feet obeyed. Gusting wind blew the dark youth’s hair back from his high forehead. I caught his firm jaw, and crowwing brows. He wore a sword at his side, and a black armband around his right arm in mourning for our dead king. The crowd was thick along the bridge. I slowed my step, watching him. His tunic was green, the color woodwards wear. The Pendragons hired woodwards to help the dragons and the fey guard Dragonswood and boot intruders out. We had our own man patro
lling the south end of the reserve (though he’d not yet caught me!). What was this woodward doing here? Had he come with the riders? I saw no horse.

  My breath caught when he glanced my way, his eyes pale gold as cinnamon. I glimpsed his keen expression before he pulled up his hood, turned, and vanished into the crowd. Fey folk can disappear that swiftly and that well, but I did not think he was fey.

  I was still trying to spot him when I was swept into the throng.

  Chapter Two

  UP HERE.” MEG climbed onto the stone bench skirting the well. Poppy and I hopped up. From there we could see above the crowd. People jostled for position close to the stage beside Sheriff Bollard’s jailhouse. I scanned the gathering, trying to find the man I’d seen at the water. So many feet stirred up the common street stench. Folk tossed garbage out their windows day and night, and emptied their sewage pots onto the cobbles below. The muckrakers were sorely overworked, trying to keep up with it all. My nose was schooled to the odor; still, a brisk sea breeze wouldn’t be amiss just now.

  Mother pushed her way through the mob with my father and Master Percival.

  “There’s your betrothed,” Meg said, spotting him too.

  Goose-necked, middle-aged Master Percival carried a fat purse. My father would prosper from the match. “Let my father marry him if he likes him so much.”

  “Tess!” Poppy laughed.

  Meg’s husband, Tom Weaver, pressed his way through the crowd with little Alice riding on his shoulders. He joined us at the well. The red-haired weaver was taller than most folk, so three-year-old Alice had the best view of all atop his shoulders. She glanced back at her mother, then pointed to my black eye. “That’s sore,” she said.

  “Hush, Alice.” Meg patted her daughter’s small back. Alice lived, I thought. Some children live. Why not Mother’s? Why was I the only one to survive when all the rest died even down to Adam? I touched Alice’s strawberry curl so lightly, she did not feel it and did not turn around.